Killing Time
by seven dials
Summary: I wrote this ten years ago. First posted under a different screen name, it's up here for sentimental purposes. It's long, daft, over-the-top and really dramatically not very good, but I don't feel right deleting it when someone may remember it fondly.
1. Chapter 1

**Killing Time, Part 1**

Author's notes: Standard disclaimers apply: Zetsuai/Bronze and all the characters therein are the property of Minami Ozaki, Margaret Comics and Shueishia (I think... I've forgotten all the companies). No insult, injury to third parties etc is intended by the publication of this story; I'm just a fan having fun. This story was written some time ago and is not representative of the things I write now. Guess I just ndded to get this kind of thing out of my system... 

Hmm, maybe I've been reading a bit more Poppy Z. Brite than can be good for an English Lit. student, so this fic comes complete with Poppy Z. Brite-style title (I can't believe she hasn't used this one!). There's just something weirdly compelling about the idea of extreme violence in Low Rent settings, or even bloody expensive ones… or is bloody the wrong word to use where Brite is concerned? Maybe that's why her books sell… and hell, the idea of Koji as a Brite-style predatory psycho is just too damn cool to pass up. After all it doesn't need too much imagination, really. One thing's for sure, the Gods of Shibuya sure are gonna get me for this one… I'd better get my smite-proof underwear out. _____ 

The bar was claustrophobic, cramped and far too hot but it didn't matter. It wasn't the kind of place where people really cared about the décor, or lack of same. The walls were painted black, only brightened up by the various posters in gaudy shades that had been pinned to them, the furniture was modern, all steel tubes and black faux-leather, and incredibly uncomfortable to sit on for any length of time. It was subterranean, so no windows. It was that sort of bar, and it was incredibly popular with certain members of the city's youth, for reasons that no one else really understood. Most people - meaning most respectable people - would have crossed the road to avoid it, but it nonetheless had a certain allure. 

Katsumi liked it because there was no chance of meeting anyone who knew his father there. They wouldn't have been seen anywhere near this place and a couple of years ago, a couple of months ago even, Katsumi wouldn't have either. He'd been fairly well behaved for most of his life compared to a lot of the kids he knew from school, but he had recently graduated and he was bored. He was on a fairly good course at a fairly good college, but nonetheless he still had very little to do in the evenings, and as a result he was experimenting with rebellion in a way that a lot of middle-class kids did. Seeing exactly how much he could get away with before his father went nuts and either kicked him out or grounded him for the foreseeable future. 

Leaning against the wall at one edge of the room, he absentmindedly twisted a strand of blonde hair around one finger. Dyeing his hair had caused a storm, as he'd expected. Madoka had liked it - she'd thought it suited him and she was totally right - but his father had not been happy. He'd been all for forcing him to dye it back, but when it came down to it how could he force him to do anything anymore? 

Still, that had been nothing compared to the row when they'd found out he'd got his ears pierced… 

Oh well, what did it matter what his father thought? He was going to move out in a couple of months anyway. There was no way he was going to stay home for much longer. Technically there was no need for him to leave home, but on the other hand he couldn't stand to live with his father for much longer. They were driving one another nuts. His father would have probably killed him if he'd found out that Katsumi was making a habit of hanging round in gay bars, which was why he didn't particularly want him to find out. 

Katsumi sighed - he was fed up. He'd arranged to meet a friend of his called Hisaya, but it didn't look like he was going to show. He probably had his reasons (girlfriend troubles most likely - Hisaya's girlfriend had to be one of the most stupid people Katsumi had ever met and he didn't know why the guy bothered with her), but Katsumi still thought he'd yell at him about it tomorrow. He didn't like being alone in here - he was still sufficiently new to this kind of lifestyle to find the atmosphere in the bar mildly unnerving, and besides it was the sort of place that he'd always been warned to stay out of. He'd heard horror stories of the kinds of things that could happen in these kinds of bars and, although he didn't really know if he believed them or not, the worry was still there. 

*** 

Standing a few feet away at the bar, Koji Nanjo was equally bored. He was not alone - he'd come with Izumi, as ever, but Izumi was still in a foul mood because of what Koji had done at that party two days ago. Despite the fact that he had entered with Koji and was standing next to him, he was currently allowing a drunken young man to flirt with him. This was one of the ways in which Izumi would take revenge on Koji when he thought he had misbehaved. This kind of "punishment" tended to anger Koji and make him prone to misbehave again. 

With an eye out for potential conquests, Koji scanned the bar. He wasn't looking for anything in particular except a pretty face, and there seemed to be plenty to choose from, as long as you weren't overly concerned about random body piercings or hair dyed in odd colours. He wanted to make Izumi feel jealous for making him feel jealous - Izumi would tire of this particular game long before he did. 

He had no idea why he'd noticed the boy in the corner - he certainly wasn't the type of person he normally tried to pick up casually behind Izumi's back, but nonetheless he at least had a certain novelty value. He didn't look totally comfortable with the atmosphere and was trying very hard to make sure he wasn't noticed. In a room full of people who all seemed to be trying to make themselves as noticeable as possible, reticence was one sure way to get attention. He had no way of knowing if this was a feature of the boy's character or simply caused by uncertainty, but there was only one real way to find out. 

Ignoring Izumi's dirty look, Koji drained his drink and walked purposefully over to where the boy was standing. People got out of the way for him. Koji was that sot of person - tall, well dressed and physically very impressive, with long, almost white-blonde hair, pale skin and eyes that gave nothing of his character away. His potential conquest hadn't noticed Koji; he was looking the other way, across the room, toward the door. Maybe waiting for someone, maybe considering leaving. Koji didn't know which and he didn't really care. If this kid was like all the others he'd met in here, he'd be a total pushover. They all were. 

*** 

"I said, do you want a drink?" 

It took Katsumi a further fifteen seconds to work out that the tall blonde with the killer dress sense was trying to talk to him. He hadn't wanted to attract attention, but he couldn't say he minded attention that looked as good as this. Nonetheless, he couldn't help but feel that this man's approach wasn't exactly novel. "Oh, please. That is such an old line. Got anything a little more original?" Katsumi responded casually, far more casually than he felt. "Anyway, I have a drink. See?" Koji was a little taken aback, but nonetheless he smiled slightly. "At least I didn't spill my drink on you." "If you'd done that, I'd have hit you. I've got a new jacket on." Katsumi addressed his comment to the half-empty glass that he was holding. "Yeah, okay, so you're about a foot taller than me, but I'd still have hit you. Though I'd probably have to stand on a chair to do it. Besides, that's an even tackier way to attempt to pick someone up than 'can I buy you a drink'. Any minute now you're probably going to ask me if I come here often. Before you ask, no I don't." "Oh, are my chat-up lines that bad? I'm totally aghast. Maybe I should buy a book of ways to pick up girls." Koji said, and was pleased to see that the boy had stopped staring into his glass like it contained the meaning of life and was now looking directly at him. "I'm not a girl, idiot. Or hadn't you noticed?" "That's obvious, but it doesn't mean I couldn't try the lines out on you." Katsumi attempted, not entirely successfully, to stifle a giggle. "What, like a trial run? It wouldn't work, you know. I'm immune to flattery." "No one's immune to flattery, not even you, I suspect." Koji pushed his hair out of his face and briefly glanced at Izumi. He was gratified to notice that he was giving him a very dirty look indeed. Turning back to the blonde, he asked again, "Are you sure you don't want a drink?" "You're trying to get me drunk? I don't even know your name." "Well, if I tell you my name, will you let me buy you a drink?" "As long as I can come with you when you get it. I don't want you sticking anything in it. Ha, like you'd want to do that. Isn't paranoia great?" 

For all his flippancy he knew this was just caution. Katsumi had picked up enough about letting people buy you drinks from what his father had said over and over to Madoka. Don't let anyone give you a drink, he'd said, that you haven't seen prepared. Madoka had laughed about it later. It was quite ridiculous how little attention his father actually paid to his children's social lives. Madoka only really went out with her best friend from school and didn't yet have a boyfriend - although she was working very hard on attracting the attentions one of the boys in her class. Katsumi was the one who needed warning, considering the kind of places he went for fun, but because he was the oldest and a boy he didn't get it. 

*** 

"Who the hell was that blonde slut you were chatting up earlier?" Izumi asked Koji angrily. The pair were sat together in their living room, but before Izumi's angry comment they had not spoken. Izumi had been fuming, and Koji had been unable to talk to him. "No one. Just some kid. He's called Shibuya." "He doesn't sound like 'no one' to me." "He's a student. And not a slut." Koji said. He felt a strange resentment toward Izumi for calling a boy he barely knew a slut. Despite the fact that, once he'd felt relaxed around him, the boy had been incredibly friendly, he hadn't behaved inappropriately unless you could call being slightly too talkative inappropriate behaviour. He'd refused to let Koji kiss him, which was something Koji normally had no problem persuading people into doing. "Oh, yeah? If I hadn't been there the two of you would probably have ended up in some tacky love hotel and if that's not behaving like a slut I don't know what is." "He's not like that. Anyway, he lives at home." Izumi sighed. "Oh, great. Then he's yet another nice middle-class boy trying his hand at being a rebel. That's just what we need right now. You sure can pick 'em, Koji." "You have to admit he's kind of pretty." Koji said. "But nowhere near as pretty as you." 

Izumi frowned - he didn't like it when Koji mentioned other peoples' looks. He hadn't thought Koji's latest conquest was anything special, and besides, he thought dyed hair was totally cheap. If truth were told he was a little jealous, but he was damned if he was going to admit it. True, this Shibuya had dyed his hair, but it had looked good. He knew that if he'd ever tried to dye his hair blonde it would have looked a total mess. He wasn't even going to start on the boy's clothing, which somehow didn't look all that bad on him but… well, he was hardly going to win any awards for his dress sense, unless they were for something like 'most conceptual use of accessories'. Izumi didn't think he was anything special in terms of his looks, though, and he hated it when Koji tried to flatter him; it smacked of desperation. 

To the infatuated Koji, though, Izumi looked perfect. True, Koji liked playing around with pretty strangers of either sex, but he didn't put his heart into these casual encounters. As he never tired of reminding Izumi, he loved him and only him. Izumi tended to assume a glazed expression and stare into the middle distance when Koji started talking like this. It bored him and he didn't think he was that attractive despite Koji's repeated assurances that he was. 

"I take it you want to meet him again". Izumi finally said. Koji hesitated. He did want to meet Shibuya again, if only to try to seduce him. At the same time, he didn't want to lose Izumi, and for some reason Izumi was taking a very dim view of their conversation. True, Shibuya was hardly a discreet person when it came to flirtation, but all the same surely Izumi could tell he didn't feel anything for the little blonde other than a desire to get him into bed. 

*** 

"Where were you last night?" Katsumi, who had been attempting to wake himself up by drinking another cup of coffee, tore his gaze away from the cup with some effort and looked up sleepily at his sister. "What?" Madoka giggled to herself - Katsumi was unconsciously very funny the morning after one of his nights out. "I said, where were you last night? What is it you do that needs you to go out three or four times a week?" "I just went out, I guess." Katsumi rested his chin on his hand and tried to look slightly more alert than he felt. "And I didn't go anywhere special. It was pretty boring." "I know the signs." Madoka said cheerfully. "You got drunk again, right? You know, father is just totally despairing of you." 

Madoka knew from experience - she had spent most of yesterday evening listening to her father lamenting the lack of control he appeared to have over his wayward son. She didn't mind it, the fact that Katsumi was in the middle of a 'difficult' patch meant that she was far less likely to get her own indiscretions picked up on. Her being an hour late back from her best friend's paled into insignificance next to Katsumi's failure to arrive back home at all when it didn't suit him. Mother kept saying hopeful things about it just being a phase and that he'd grow out of it, but Madoka secretly hoped he wouldn't. Or at least, not for a while yet. 

"Let him." Katsumi replied sleepily, closing his eyes. "Hey. Onisan." Madoka waved a hand in front of Katsumi's face, succeeding in getting him to open his eyes again. "Just what did you do last night? Meet anyone interesting?" "No. It was boring." Katsumi said. Lying. Koji had been interesting to talk to, maybe he'd go back to that bar in a couple of days, just casually, on the off-chance Koji was there again… Katsumi wasn't really sure of much at the moment, but he had decided pretty firmly whilst walking back home early that morning that he definitely wanted to get to know Koji Nanjo a lot better. 

Part 2 


	2. Chapter 2

**Killing Time, Part 2**

"Just who is this Koji Nanjo anyway?" Hisaya asked Katsumi a few days later. 

The night before they had gone back to the bar together, Hisaya to see what it was like, Katsumi to look for Koji. Hisaya hadn't liked the place much. It unnerved him, and he knew that Eri, the strident blonde girl he loved and whom Katsumi disliked intensely, wouldn't have liked it much either. The fact that Katsumi had finally seen Koji after about an hour had only added to his feelings of unease, as his friend had been too absorbed in talking to (flirting with? Probably. He'd heard Katsumi giggle a lot more than usual, but it could also have been because by that point he was more than a little drunk. If Katsumi sober had little sense of propriety, it was embarrassing to even admit you knew Katsumi when he was drunk) the beautiful young man to have much time for him. Koji unnerved Hisaya too. There was something vaguely vampiric about Koji, and Katsumi appeared to be totally in thrall to him. It didn't seem healthy to Hisaya. 

"He's a singer." Katsumi replied, idly flipping through a spiral-bound notebook containing his lecture notes and, more frequently, doodles, vague scribbles about half-remembered dreams and a couple of unfinished letters to Miyako, a girl he had gone out with in high school who had dropped him shortly after graduation for a salaryman eight years their senior. She had refused to speak to him since, so he'd decided to try to write her a letter explaining everything, but somehow it never came out quite right and his attempts to redraft it were getting less and less frequent. He'd been on the verge of calling their relationship off himself - by the time he had graduated it had felt almost as if he was going out with her because he couldn't quite bring himself to tell her it was over. It was probably just a wounded ego due to the fact that she broke up with him before he could do it to her which had made him even start those damn letters, he realised now. 

"A singer? That's all you know?" Hisaya asked. Katsumi placed the book on the table, open at a page showing a bad drawing of a creature that looked a bit like a raccoon. "If you know anything else about him, tell me." "How should I know more about him? I've only met him once" "Well, how should I?" Katsumi replied. "I've only met him twice." "You spent long enough talking to him last night." "It wasn't that kind of conversation." Katsumi said slightly primly. "We were just talking. It wasn't like he was trying to seduce me." 

Katsumi knew he was lying. Koji had made another attempt at flirtation and Katsumi had been drunk enough not to bother with the pretence that he wasn't interested. He had put up no more than a token resistance when Koji had tried to get a bit more physical with him. On cold reflection, Katsumi felt slightly ashamed by it all, but couldn't quite put his finger on why, although he knew that if he had been a bit more sober he wouldn't have let Koji do anything. 

For all that Katsumi had managed to keep his voice offhand, Hisaya was not convinced. "Oh yeah, sure. That's why you let him spend fifteen minutes kissing you, right?" "Okay, so maybe I did flirt with him, but it wasn't anything more than that." "If Eri spent fifteen minutes kissing some guy, then told me she wasn't doing anything more than flirting with him, I wouldn't believe her like I don't believe you." "I'm not your girlfriend, Kunihide Hisaya." Picking up the notebook, Katsumi shut it with a snap and reached for his bag. "She's attached. I'm not. It's not the same thing at all. Besides, Eri isn't exactly the faithful type, is she?" "Where are you going?" Hisaya asked. He felt slightly offended - Katsumi's comment on Eri's lack of fidelity had stung. "I have a class to go to. And shouldn't you be in school?" 

*** 

Izumi knew Koji had been out with someone last night, but he couldn't prove it. For a start, there was none of the usual clues - no smell of cheap perfume clung to his discarded clothing, nor was there any trace of cosmetic. The kind of women Koji tended to go out with in the evenings normally wore heavy make-up and their perfume was often overpoweringly strong. He had no idea what Koji saw in women who looked and acted like prostitutes, but maybe it was that they didn't mind the idea of being a one-night stand in the way that others who looked and acted less like they charged for their services might. 

Yet Koji had come back frustrated and Izumi had immediately suspected that he had been flirting with someone else. Koji normally got like this when he had spent all evening talking to someone only to have them refuse to let him go home with them. 

For some reason Izumi had found himself thinking about the flirtatious bottle-blonde kid he had seen Koji with a week ago. The more he thought about it the more likely it seemed that Koji was with him. The kid wasn't the type to just put out for anyone if what Koji had said to him earlier was true, and there was no reason to suspect it wasn't despite his disparaging comments in that direction. Izumi suspected that what had happened was that Koji had gone out looking for casual sex and had just happened to meet up with the boy, had tried it on with him again and been rebuffed. It was no more than he deserved if you asked Izumi. 

Koji didn't normally go for men besides him. Izumi couldn't help but feel jealous. Koji told him, again and again, that the one-night stands meant nothing to him. It was just casual sex. But it didn't feel like that as he lay awake in bed and waited for Koji to come back, wanting him, wanting him dead. He never slept well when Koji wasn't there. 

Izumi felt stirrings of resentment toward this boy, the little blonde who he barely knew. 

*** 

A few weeks later, early evening. Katsumi sang two or three bars of a pop song as he stood in front of his mirror and fiddled with his hair. He didn't know why but he felt like singing. Koji was a singer too. He hadn't made it big, but from what he'd heard, the man had deserved to. He had a fantastic voice. Katsumi thought it matched his body. That was fantastic too. Seemed to Katsumi that most things about Koji were fantastic. 

They'd met deliberately several more times since their first, accidental one about a month earlier. Koji had lately been getting a bit more urgent, but Katsumi didn't care. It didn't matter if Koji wanted to sleep with him or not. Seemed that it was becoming inevitable anyway. What he wasn't sure about was how soon he wanted to let Koji do it. 

A few nights ago he'd realised he'd fallen in love with the man, or if not love then in very strong infatuation. What was worse? 

Months later, nineteen years old and far wiser, on cold reflection, he wondered why he had seen what he had seen in Koji… and why he hadn't spotted what seemed to be the most obvious thing about the man to most of those he asked about him later. Twenty/twenty hindsight. It was all very well people talking ad nauseam about how they'd always seen the signs. They were lying anyway, there were no signs then. It wasn't just that Katsumi was too blinded by infatuation to spot them - no one else had spotted them either. 

Back then, he hadn't known what he'd known and it frightened him to think of himself as so naïve. For all the feeble protests he had mounted about not really trusting Koji, it was clear that from the start he'd trusted him totally. 

The night on which he stood in front of his mirror and sung softly a few nonsense lines from a tune that his little sister liked didn't seem like it had anything to do with him now. At the time, he'd smiled at his reflection and giggled a bit, over what he could no longer remember. He sometimes wondered what he'd been thinking back then. It had been pretty simplistic thoughts about what he wanted to do that evening, about whether he should get Koji's phone number, or could he count what he was doing as dating or not. Koji had asked him to meet him later that night, was that a date or wasn't it? 

Was Koji the kind who expected you to go all the way or not? Katsumi was still a virgin, having never got very far with Miyako, they'd neither of them seemed overly keen on that idea. But what about Koji? Katsumi wasn't so naïve as not to notice that Koji wanted to sleep with him. What he didn't know was if it would lead to anything more. 

Katsumi wished his memories of the rest of the night were as vague as those relating to the few minutes he had spent in his bedroom prior to going out, but for all his attempts to try to forget them, they remained as sharp and as painful as broken glass. He couldn't forget. Eventually, he'd given up the attempt. 

*** 

Izumi didn't like it. Koji's one-night stands he could tolerate if they were just that. One night stands. He didn't like what that Shibuya was becoming to Koji, they'd seen one another far too often now for Izumi's comfort. There was too much danger of Koji becoming involved mentally as well as physically. He could just have told Koji flat out that he didn't want to see Shibuya anymore, but how could he be sure, when the boy haunted the same places as they did when they were together, and the same places that Koji went alone? How could he be sure that Koji wouldn't find him again? 

Izumi clenched his fists tightly and glowered angrily at nothing. He was jealous, hated to admit it, but he was jealous. Jealous of some stupid kid Koji had decided was flavour of the month at the moment. Logic told him it couldn't last, it would fizzle out if he left it, but he didn't feel he could leave it. Logic had taken a short break on Izumi. For all he said he loved him, Koji seemed to have a very shaky view of commitment. 

To Izumi it seemed a far more permanent solution to the problem he perceived Shibuya as being was called for. Just telling him to leave wouldn't work. He'd seen Koji with him on a couple of occasions and it was plain that the stupid boy was infatuated with him, totally, utterly in love. It was probably being in the kitchen mutilating a potato which made him hit on the 'solution' that he did. 

A test. That's what he'd say. If Koji truly loved him like he claimed to, if Shibuya really was nothing more than a passing fancy, then Koji would do it, because he loved him. If he really wanted to screw Katsumi, then he could do it before he got rid of him. Koji wasn't to carry on like this. Koji was his, and he wasn't to keep messing around with some strange boy. The more he thought of the idea, the better it seemed. If he had stopped to imagine what could have happened next, it may not have seemed like such a good idea, but at the time the idea had a potent charm. He hadn't stopped to think. 

Maybe if Izumi had slept on it, he'd have come to his senses, but he hadn't. Instead, he'd called the bar they were regulars at and had asked to talk to Koji Nanjo. Waiting for an opportunity to arise naturally would take too long, the longer he left it the greater the danger that Katsumi would come to mean something more to Koji than a casual screw became. After a few minutes, the barman passed the phone to a suspiciously breathless Koji (but at least he was there, which was a relief to Izumi), who expressed mild surprise at Izumi's call. Izumi didn't care for the pleasantry and brushed off Koji's confused attempts to flirt. He had far more important things to discuss. 

"Is that Shibuya kid with you?" Izumi asked brusquely. Koji looked round the crowded bar. "Katsumi?" Izumi noted angrily that Koji had called the boy by his first name. "He's here, but not right next to me if that's what you mean." "Good. I want to talk to you about him." Confused. "Why?" Izumi took a deep breath, then spoke. "I want him to come here tonight." If possible, Koji sounded more confused. "But what…" Izumi cut him off. "Nothing like that. I want to get rid of him."  "Tell him you want him to leave me alone?" Koji felt mildly guilty saying that. It was, after all, he who had initiated the encounters. "No." Izumi spoke angrily. "I mean get rid of him. Properly. Permanently." Koji hesitated. Had Izumi gone mad? What did he mean, 'permanently'? "Think of it" Izumi said quietly, "as a way of proving your feelings for me." "You know I love you." Koji finally found his voice. "Prove it, then." Izumi said levelly, and put the phone down. 

*** 

Arriving back at the flat with Katsumi, Koji had felt incredibly guilty. What was there to do? He loved Izumi, he'd do anything for him… anything? Up to and including killing someone he cared for? But what did he feel for Katsumi? Part of him wanted to scream at the boy, tell him to run, tell him to leave and never speak to him again if he valued his life, but what was it that had stopped him? He may not have loved Katsumi in the way Katsumi loved him, but he certainly didn't hate him enough to wish him any real harm. 

But surely if Koji didn't wish the boy any harm, he'd have told him to leave and never talk to him again? 

The pair met Izumi in the living room. He held a kitchen knife in one hand, his arm hanging loosely down by his side. Katsumi looked confused and mildly startled - Koji realised that he hadn't known of Izumi's existence before now, and was probably trying to work out who he was, what he wanted and what the kitchen knife was for. Probably trying to look for an innocent explanation for the situation. Koji gripped his upper arm a little too tightly, and he winced. 

"Cut that out, Koji." "Oh, sorry…" "Don't let him go." Izumi's voice was quiet, but his expression was angry. "Shibuya, isn't it?" Still bewildered, Katsumi looked slightly blank. "Oh… yeah. Do you know Koji?" "Know him?" Izumi laughed. "We're lovers." Katsumi frowned slightly, and he spoke accusingly. Somehow he'd gotten involved in someone else's soap opera - playing the part of the other woman, no less, normally a very short-term proposition - and he didn't like the feeling one bit. "Koji, you never told me about…" 

Koji looked down at the boy with an expression of mild distress, then released his grip on his upper arm only to pull his wrists roughly behind his back. Katsumi yelped. "What the hell are you doing?" he shouted at Koji, and gasped slightly when he felt the man tie his wrists together - with what he had no idea. He wasn't frightened yet. It all seemed too unreal. So it wasn't a soap opera after all. Now it was like a scene from one of the trashy movies he sometimes watched with Hisaya, except that there would have been a woman in the scene somewhere. He should have been a woman. Izumi smiled slightly, enjoying the little blonde's confusion. He hadn't known if Koji would go through with it, but it seemed he'd convinced him. Feeling a sense of pride at his own persuasive skill, Izumi walked towards Katsumi and passed the knife to Koji. 

"Now, Koji," he said, with a small - but to Katsumi decidedly chilling - smile, "it's up to you." 

Part 3 


	3. Chapter 3

**Killing Time, Part 3**

Katsumi strained round in an attempt to look at Koji's expression, but Izumi slapped him, hard, and grabbed his chin so he was forced to look into his eyes. "Next time you want a casual fuck, pick up someone who isn't already taken." Izumi's sudden anger - previously he had spoken in a restrained way - caused Katsumi to flinch slightly. "I was right, you know. You are a little slut." "That wasn't it!" In spite of the situation, Katsumi couldn't help but to blush uncomfortably, in spite of the fact that he felt quite inexplicably angry, causing the older boy to look contemptuously at him before turning away. "Do it, Koji." 

An irony. If Katsumi had known Koji had already got a lover then he wouldn't have dreamed of intervening. 

"Koji…" 

The boy's voice was like glass. Brittle. His eyes were wide, disbelieving. This isn't happening, this sort of thing only happens in TV shows. It doesn't happen in real life. But that's why father said to stay out of those bars. Stay away from that kind of person. You never know who they are, never know if you can trust them. And of course you can't trust them. Father had probably expected that something like this would happen. 

Koji held the knife to Katsumi's throat in a hand which shook slightly. He didn't want to do this. But it was Izumi who'd asked. Izumi, to whom Koji had said he'd give anything if he only asked. Izumi, the person he'd said he'd die for. He had made no such promises to Katsumi, though he felt terrible. A few hours ago, the boy had told him he thought he loved him. Guiltily, he realised that the situation was turning him on. Was this all that he had wanted from Katsumi all along? he wondered, as he fumbled with the boy's clothing with his free hand. Had he only been interested in him because he wanted to destroy him? 

Izumi hadn't asked for this. But there was no way Koji was prepared to kill Katsumi without having screwed him first. 

Feeling Koji's hands on his bare skin, Katsumi trembled as the man undressed him. He was terrified now, too scared to scream. He couldn't see Koji's face, but seeing Izumi's was bad enough - a contemptuous sneer contorted his features. What had Katsumi ever done to him, except fall in love with Koji? Was this what you got when you loved someone? he wondered as Koji pushed him forward onto his front, landing awkwardly due to his tied wrists and bruising his knees. The pain made him gasp. The carpet tickled his skin and he sneezed. Dust and fluff and god only knew what else. Izumi stood a few feet away, just looking, and he blushed again. Being seen. Izumi's eyes were hard and scornful. Derisive. 

"I'm a virgin," he gasped, not even realising why he said it. He knew what the game was now. Izumi laughed again, a sound Katsumi was coming to hate. "You'd better be careful with him then, Koji. You don't want to damage him." Koji glared angrily at Izumi. Regardless of all the promises he had made to the other man, he came closer to hitting Izumi then than he ever had before. 

It hurt when Koji entered him, far more than he'd realised it would. He'd screamed and Izumi had slapped him again and told him to shut up. There was no way he could have even if he'd wanted to and Izumi knew that - he'd just wanted to hit him. "Wouldn't it be better if he was quiet?" Koji said. "No. I want to hear him scream. Let the neighbours worry." From the level tones of their voices, they could just as easily have been discussing a dog that was barking too loudly rather than a person. Katsumi whimpered softly and blinked back tears, and knew that he was going to die. 

*** 

Hisaya had been watching the television when the phone rang, startling him and making him spill his drink slightly. He wasn't expecting any calls. Eri had gone back to her flat about half an hour earlier, but he didn't expect she'd be back yet. She'd probably have gone drinking or to a party or something. Standing up and stretching, he picked the phone up and collapsed unceremoniously back into his chair before speaking. 

"Hisaya." "Hello?" A girl's voice, not Eri's, speaking anxiously. "Can I speak to Kunihide, please?" "Speaking." The girl's embarrassment was tangible. "Oh… sorry…" "Don't worry." "Hisaya, I'm really sorry to bother you by calling so late, but I was wondering if you'd seen my brother." Hisaya frowned in confusion. This phone call was like a crossword puzzle. "Your brother? Do I know him?" The girl paused, then spoke slightly accusingly. "I'm Madoka Shibuya." It was Hisaya's turn to feel embarrassed. "Ah. No, I haven't seen Katsumi for a couple of days. Has something happened?" "I don't know. He was going out this evening, but he said he'd be back by now. Father said I wasn't to make a fuss but I'm too worried not to…" Madoka's voice tailed off. "I wouldn't worry if I was you. You know Katsumi. He's never been very punctual. He's probably just been held up somewhere. I'm sure he's fine, but if it makes you feel any better, I'll let you know if I hear anything from him." 

*** 

Sitting in his car at a set of traffic lights, Koji muttered a string of inventive curses. He couldn't believe it. Here he was stuck waiting at a red light at past midnight when the road was almost totally clear in both directions. This had not been what he intended to do with his Friday night. On the other hand, practically none of the events of the last few hours fell into a category he would have defined as even remotely normal for any night of his life to date. 

Reaching over, he checked Katsumi's pulse again. Weak but steady. He couldn't believe he was doing this. But he didn't want Katsumi dead, no matter what Izumi said about him. He didn't know how he'd explain it to Izumi, but he wasn't letting the boy bleed to death on their living-room floor. 

Fifteen minutes earlier, leaving Izumi asleep in their bedroom, Koji had walked back into the living-room and looked down at Katsumi where he lay on the carpet, his wrists still tied behind his back with Koji's belt, curled up on one side, his eyes closed, the lashes still wet with tears. The light blue shirt he had worn at the beginning of the evening was stained crimson with his own blood, the carpet was soaked with it. The rest of his clothing was scattered around the room. Koji had no idea if he was alive or not before he knelt down beside him, staining the knees of his white trousers red, blood on his shirt, in his long hair, on his hands. Most of it had been there before he had knelt on the carpet. 

Koji felt totally disgusted with himself. He had enjoyed himself earlier, enjoyed what he was doing. He could tell by the look in Izumi's eyes that he'd enjoyed it too. Neither could have explained why at the time but Koji now suspected that he'd got a kick from the power he'd felt, and from the fact that he now realised that the reason he'd found Katsumi attractive was precisely because, despite all the boy's attempts to make it appear otherwise, he had seemed so totally innocent, and Koji had wanted to annihilate that innocence. Show him that you can't play dangerous games if you don't know all the rules. It could have been what had motivated Izumi too, although he suspected that Izumi had probably wanted revenge as well. Revenge for what? 

Maybe it was guilt that was prompting him to try to keep Katsumi alive now. He hadn't wanted to hurt him like this. 

Although he had managed to keep fairly quiet during the rape, Katsumi had started to scream again when Koji had stabbed him. He'd had a nice body, once, and a pretty face. Koji had left his face alone, he didn't know why but he'd seen it as a bridge too far, but if he lived - if he lived… shit, this is so totally screwed up, Koji thought - he'd still be scarred for life. He now sat slumped against the window in the seat next to Koji, deeply unconscious, his bloody shirt and bare legs hidden by the coat Koji had wrapped round him prior to carrying him out to the car. It, too, was rapidly becoming stained with Katsumi's blood. Koji hadn't realised, before, how much a person could bleed, and yet still stay alive. 

He hoped the boy was still alive. 

*** 

"You did what?" Izumi yelled. If he had been angry last night, he was furious now. Koji looked back at him, just as angry, but speaking calmly. "You heard. I took him to hospital. He's alive, just. I don't care what you wanted to do with him, I wasn't going to let that kid bleed to death on our carpet." "Idiot! What do you think will happen if he lives? He'll tell the police!" Koji folded his arms stubbornly. "You should have thought of that before you told me to kill him." "I didn't think you'd take him to a bloody hospital!" "You wanted him to die here, you mean. Great, Izumi, just fantastic. What the hell do you think you'd have done with him if he had died? Dump the body in the street and hope no one realised he wasn't a cereal packet? You think people wouldn't have noticed he'd gone missing? If you've got to take out your jealousy on one of my one-night stands, why the hell'd you have to choose one with a family?" "Jealousy? Who's jealous?" Izumi retorted. Koji sighed, and decided to change the subject - Izumi would never admit that he was jealous of any of Koji's one-night stands. "That's not the point right now. Right now that kid's in no state to start accusing anyone of anything. What we've got to do now is get rid of any proof that he ever came here, if it's just his word against ours it'll be easier for us. How the hell are we going to get the blood out of the carpet?" Sobering immediately, Izumi looked round the living room. He had to admit that Koji had a point, the most immediate problem was the state of the room. "We should have done it in the bathroom. It's so much easier to clean tiles. I suppose we could always move the couch over the stain if we can't shift it." "What about his clothing?" Koji asked. Izumi hesitated. "We burn it." he said finally. "There's no way we can leave it out with the rubbish bags. Too risky." He looked back round the room, noticed for the first time the bloodstains on the white-painted walls. "Those can be washed off. Did anyone see you leaving the house last night?" "Not as far as I know." Koji replied. He hadn't seen anyone on the stairs from the flat, no one had looked into the car or anything and at the hospital they'd been too preoccupied with Katsumi to take much notice of the car's number plates. "Good." Izumi felt completely in control of the situation now. "Go check the car. See if there's any blood on the seats or anything. And see that he didn't leave anything in the car. If there is, we burn that too." There was no point in not doing something properly. 

*** 

That afternoon, Madoka had just arrived back home from school and was headed to her bedroom when she heard the telephone ring. She herself wasn't meant to pick the phone up, if a call was for her, father would let her know, so she quietly walked back into the hall to eavesdrop on the conversation, one ear to the door of father's study. 

Katsumi still hadn't come back. She hadn't been able to concentrate at school for worrying, although she had expected him to be back by the time she came back home. She hadn't expected to come back in to the sound of the telephone, she'd expected to walk in on one of the worryingly intense rows which father often had with Katsumi and which she and her stepmother privately suspected they both enjoyed rather too much. At least it was some kind of interaction, she guessed. 

The conversation was quiet, she couldn't hear it. When people listened into conversations in the movies they never had to worry about whether or not they could hear. They could always hear perfectly. Maybe villains in the movies always talked too loud. Looked like she'd just have to ask father what it was all about when the conversation was over. Sighing, Madoka picked up her book bag again, ran her fingers through her short, light brown hair and went back to her room where she collapsed on the bed and looked out of the window. A few minutes later she heard footsteps in the corridor outside and sat up just before her father knocked on the door and opened it. She was mildly affronted. 

"If you're going to knock, you could at least wait for me to reply! I could have been getting changed!" Madoka began, then sobered, noticing the look on her father's face. "Is something the matter?" 

It was an awkward situation. Madoka and her father didn't speak that much. He was pretty distant towards her and had been towards Katsumi. The only reason he spent so much time fretting over him now was that his son's behaviour was giving him grey hairs. The tension in the air was palpable. Madoka knew her father wanted to tell her something, but what? 

"Who was that on the phone?" she asked. "Did Onisan call?" Her father's silence was enough to tell her that was not what had happened. "Does someone know where he is?" "Madoka…" the older man said, speaking hesitantly. She looked at him expectantly, anxiously. "What?" She paused. "Has something happened to Onisan?" After another excruciating, agonising silence, the man finally spoke. "He was admitted to hospital last night." "Is he alright?" "He's alive…" He didn't want to tell the girl everything. The doctor who had phoned had not been hopeful. Katsumi was alive, just, but there was no knowing if he'd survive or not. They had refused to be drawn on what was actually wrong with him. A doctor himself, he knew what that was likely to mean. It seemed unlikely that he'd just been in an accident. It wasn't what he had been told that worried him, it was what he hadn't been. 

*** 

Koji looked at Izumi across the washing-up bowl of water he had set on the floor near to the stain on the carpet and smiled at him. Izumi, dressed in a pair of shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt, was cleaning the walls with a sponge. He wore a pair of rubber gloves and didn't notice Koji's smile, concentrating as he was in washing the stains off the wall. Looking away again, Koji looked down into his bowl and noticed that the water he was wringing out of his own sponge, like the water in the bowl, had taken on a pinkish tinge. 

"Do we have any stain remover?" he asked, after a pause. Izumi hesitated. "We've got something for normal stains. Like coffee or wine. I don't think they make a cleaner for getting bloodstains out of carpets." "I don't suppose we should buy a new carpet?" "Too suspicious." Izumi replied shortly. "We'll clean this one." "You mean I'll clean this one." Koji said. 

The pair fell silent for a while as they once again concentrated on cleaning, but when Koji got up to go and change the water in the washing-up bowl, Izumi spoke again. "Koji?" "What?" Koji asked, turning to look at him. Izumi had to stifle a giggle. Koji may have been renowned for his good looks, but standing in the middle of the living-room wearing old, slightly too small clothes and a pair of yellow rubber gloves, with his hair scraped back out of his face and wearing a pair of glasses he was hardly the epitome of sexy. The fact that he was carrying a grey washing-up bowl of soapy water with a comical yellow sponge floating on top of it completed the picture. Quickly assuming a more serious expression, Izumi carried on. "At least we know not to do it in the living room next time." "Next time?" 

He's joking, Koji thought as he refilled the bowl in the kitchen. He has to be joking. What does he mean, next time? He had been on the verge of laughing it off when a thought struck him. What if Izumi means it? 

Next time? He wants to do it again? 

Part 4 


	4. Chapter 4

**Killing Time, Part 4**

It was raining heavily. Although he still had his eyes closed, Katsumi could tell by the noise. It wasn't very loud, but in the stillness of the room anything would have sounded loud. He liked the sound of rain. It was relaxing and normally when he sat and watched the rain falling he would end up in a mild daze. It was not an unpleasant feeling, and not unlike the way he was feeling now. Tired and confused and not really minding all that much. Shifting position slightly, he winced. It hurt to move. Had he slept in some weird position or something? And why the hell were his joints so stiff? 

He opened his eyes a fraction (he didn't like lying with his eyes closed when he wasn't trying to sleep, and despite his own weariness he didn't want to fall asleep again - he wasn't quite sure why), only to close them again almost immediately. The lights in the room, though they were not bright, hurt his eyes. He wasn't sure he wanted to open then again for fear of what, or rather who, could be there. With the light came memories. 

Koji. Worse, that other man - what was his name again? Had he ever been told? Did that matter when all he wanted to do was make sure he never met him again? Just remembering what he looked like would be enough. Katsumi remembered the man's brown hair and his dark, irrationally angry eyes. He remembered them both, remembered what they had done, and was suddenly terrified. He had no idea where he was, he was aware of nothing around him but the sound of the rain and the pain in his head and chest. He was utterly helpless. If Koji was anywhere around, he would kill him. Katsumi knew that for a fact. 

Broken glass. 

But he was alone. It was late at night - he had no idea what the time was: it was about half past eleven - and there was nobody else around. Not Koji or the other one, not anybody. He was alone and that was alright. That was better than alright - it was positively good. If he was alone, he was at least safe. He didn't want to kill himself. 

He'd known from the first that he wasn't at home (the room had white walls - he'd painted the walls of his own room bright purple when he was about fourteen), but the smell was enough to tell him he wasn't at Koji's either, unless Koji had started ferociously disinfecting his flat. A hospital smell. Well, he thought vaguely, shouldn't be too hard to work out where I am from that, even for me. 

It was at least half an hour before anyone even realised he'd come round. Once his head had cleared a bit that gave Katsumi ample time to think. There was, after all, nothing wrong with his head. Life wasn't like the movies. In films people always wake up in hospital on bright sunny days and they're never alone. For Katsumi, whose last conscious memories had been like something out of a late-night slasher movie, it was strangely reassuring to wake up alone and find out that his life hadn't somehow been reduced to TV size. Junk TV was all right to watch but to actually live it was something else. Right now he wanted to be left alone and thanks to the hour he had been. 

God, he'd been such an idiot. A total idiot. Agreeing to go home with a man he realised he'd barely known, he'd known so little about him he hadn't even realised that he already had a lover. Hadn't realised he was so dangerously unhinged. Katsumi realised that every time he had spoken to Koji of his own life, his family and his friends, Koji had let him do most of the talking. Koji himself had given very little away whilst Katsumi had been prepared to talk for hours about everything that he had ever found important. 

Katsumi was left alone with his thoughts and the noise of the rain on the windowpanes. 

*** 

"Well?" Izumi asked. "'Well' what?" Koji responded, his mind elsewhere. He still couldn't help but feel guilty over Katsumi. The boy had liked him. He'd said he loved him. And he'd tried to kill him. Izumi didn't know it and Koji hoped that he never would find out, but he'd clandestinely been calling the hospital to find out how Katsumi was. 

Still unconscious over three weeks later. Three weeks. To Koji it sounded bad. He had no idea if Katsumi would ever manage to recover. He'd probably never be the same again. Koji had even been to see him once or twice (there was no way he'd be able to do it if the boy was ever to regain consciousness. Izumi, Koji suspected, was hoping he'd never recover. Dead men tell no tales). I did that, he'd thought, and had felt the same guilty pleasure he had the night he'd done it, but this time it was tempered with a sense of grief. Koji may not have actually killed the boy, but he'd as good as done so… and for a few seconds at the very least, the intention had been there. The only reason he hadn't managed to do so was because he'd failed to reach any major arteries. 

"'Well', are we going out tonight? We've barely done anything for weeks." 

Lying low for a while had seemed like the safest bet, but as far as Izumi was concerned this lying low had gone on to long. Koji had been quiet, too quiet, strangely content to stay in. It wasn't like him and Izumi suspected him of moping over that Shibuya kid (Izumi was already having difficulty remembering Katsumi's first name). 

"Oh. Yeah, okay." Koji sounded unenthusiastic and Izumi felt angry. "Koji, for God's sake. Will you stop it?" "Stop what?" Koji couldn't see what there was to stop. Izumi glared at him. "Pull yourself together. Stop obsessing over Kazumi." "Katsumi." "Whatever." Izumi said firmly. "It doesn't matter. Forget him. If he isn't dead, he's dead to you. Get your butt off that sofa, we're going out." 

Reluctantly, Koji walked into the bathroom to prepare for the evening. He didn't know if he wanted to go out, but maybe Izumi was right. Maybe he needed to take his mind off things for a bit and going out seemed like one way to forget. 

"Izumi?" A sudden memory nagged at him and something in him wouldn't let it lie. "What?" Izumi called from the other room where he was brushing his hair. "What did you mean," Koji began, "when you said that at least we know not to do it in the living room next time?" 

Izumi appeared in the bathroom door, leaning on the frame, and Koji frankly stared. He was beautiful, his straight brown hair neatly brushed, his eyes bright but somehow cold. Koji was not the only one who'd struggled with his conscience in the aftermath of that night three weeks ago. Izumi had found it exciting too, and over the last few days, when he had gotten over his feeling of mild consternation that he'd really tried to kill someone who hadn't in truth done anything much to him, he had found himself trying to think of ways that he could recapture the exhilaration he had felt, his feeling of total power. There was only one way he could think of. 

"Exactly that. I want to do it again." Izumi replied. Koji looked at him in utter amazement. "Again? Why?" He couldn't quite believe he'd heard correctly. He'd just had to go and ask that stupid question… "Because." Izumi replied simply. "It's a turn-on. We've got nothing to lose. If the police find out what we did to your Kazumi we're as good as dead anyway. We're already in too deep so what's the harm in going deeper? As long as we're cautious we can't get caught. I know you found it sexy. Let's do it again, Koji." 

*** 

"You know that blonde kid who used to come in here?" "Which one?" "Well, you probably don't remember him… but he was here quite a lot over the last few months. You flirted with him a couple of times." "Oh, you mean Nanjo's friend… that airhead student who wanted to be a doctor… the one with the conceptual dress sense, right? I thought you meant a natural blonde. That one dyed his hair." "That'd be the one. Did you hear what happened to him?" "Has something happened to him?" "Has something… where have you been? He's in hospital! Some guy he went home with raped him then tried to kill him. Damn near succeeded, too." "When? Why didn't you say?" "Couple of weeks ago… I thought you knew." 

Koji had not been in the bar fifteen minutes when, whilst standing by the bar next to an unusually contemplative Izumi, he overheard two people who were clearly trying the Visual Kei look and failing practically every step of the way discussing Katsumi - not that they knew that was his name. Koji had listened to it in mild amazement. It didn't sound like any event from his life they were discussing. Had Katsumi heard it, he'd have found it hard to recognise what had happened to him in that discussion. The Proto-Goths made it appear that the incident had been more like a violent erotic fantasy than an attempted murder. 

The whole thing sounded like an urban myth rather than anything real, the kind of story that so many people told where chilling things happened to individuals whose names had long since been considered a mere technicality, who had in fact lost their individuality long ago. Do you know that boy in our year who… did I tell you what happened to Mr X's last assistant… One of my father's friends once knew this woman… a couple of years ago these two girls went walking along this path like we are now, and they… you know that blonde kid who used to come in here? 

Izumi looked up at the two proto-Goths curiously. "Who's that you're talking about?" The one who had spoken first gave him an incredulous smile. "You mean you haven't heard either? Some kid who used to come in here was practically killed a while back." "Killed?" Izumi's face was a picture of startled bewilderment. "Yeah." The man seemed to take a grotesque pleasure in recounting his story. "He wanted a one-night stand, from what I heard, and got a bit more than he bargained for. The guy he went home with was some kind of psycho and he didn't realise until he had a knife at his throat. It's pretty stupid behaviour, really, but some kids… they're just totally clueless." 

Funny, Koji thought, how they make it sound like it was Katsumi's fault for going home with me - for trusting me - rather than mine. 

Izumi sighed. "I wish I could say I was surprised, but it's so dangerous these days. What happened?" he asked. You would never have guessed from his tone that he already knew the story inside and out, that he had a starring role in it. 

Izumi would have made a fantastic actor had he ever chosen to make a career of it. 

*** 

Later on, Katsumi couldn't even remember what it was he'd been dreaming about. He never remembered his dreams for very long, which was why he wrote down the weird ones he could remember in his notebooks. He couldn't remember this one at all. Yet, at the time, it had terrified him. He hadn't even seemed aware that it had been a dream. 

He couldn't even remember it and when he'd been told about it later on he'd been incredulous. Me? Haven't you got the wrong person? Why would I do something like that? Do I look the hysterical type? To him it seemed a little implausible, more than a little, to be honest. He didn't dream very often and the last time he'd had a really bad dream he'd been eight years old and feverish. Maybe a little younger than that, even. 

But the first time Takasaka had noticed him he'd been hysterical. 

He'd screamed, which was why they'd ultimately had to sedate him. Takasaka hadn't been there from the very beginning, but he'd heard him scream. By the time he arrived, out of curiosity rather than obligation as someone was already there and one more person - in the shape of a harassed junior doctor - wasn't going to help at all, one of the duty nurses was already talking quietly to the boy in an attempt to get him to calm down a bit. Kneeling on the bed, Katsumi was gasping for air, clearly petrified, staring straight ahead at something none of the other people in the room could see, eyes wide. Takasaka knew what it was like to have nightmares but he'd never had anything this intense. He couldn't remember witnessing anything this intense though he'd seen a good few patients in the middle of night terrors before. It came with the territory when you worked in psychiatrics. 

"It's okay. You're safe. Breathe deep." The voice of the duty nurse remained calm despite the nervousness visible in her face. She never liked it when patients had panic attacks. For Takasaka it was an uncomfortable reminder that whilst the doctors had found it fairly straightforward to fix Katsumi's body, fixing the mind was more complex. Mental trauma had always, for some reason, reminded him of broken plates. Even if you manage to fix the plate, put everything back where it was, look closely and you can still see the cracks. The scars left from injuries like Katsumi's were not just physical, cliché though it was to say such a thing. Clichés had to come from somewhere. 

He knew Katsumi through his injuries. Considering how he'd got them, was it any wonder he had nightmares? The boy had refused to even contemplate counselling, though if the dreams were anything to go by he badly needed it. 

"It's okay." 

It wasn't. Far from it. Standing by the door, uncomfortably aware that he shouldn't have been anywhere near this room, Takasaka watched as another doctor, an older one, gave the boy a sedative. He didn't know how he felt about that. Logic said it was sensible - it was the middle of the night, after all, and right now getting some sleep would probably help Katsumi far more than anything else would - but Takasaka couldn't help but wonder. It didn't seem right. It wasn't as if the problem would go away with drugs. It would be suppressed, that was all. 

Long after the room had emptied itself of doctors and nurses, Takasaka found himself walking back to the doorway and standing hesitantly on the threshold as he had done a few hours ago, feeling self-conscious, as if it was somehow a transgression just to be there and in some respects it was. He had no right to be there, none at all. He wasn't Katsumi's doctor. He shouldn't even have been in the hospital. He wasn't on night shifts, but it wasn't like he had anything to go home to. 

A few feet away, Katsumi slept the deep, dreamless sleep of the heavily sedated. 

*** 

"I hate this place. Hospitals give me the creeps." "Hey… if you hate hospitals, why are you studying medicine? Weirdo." "I don't know… it was something to do, I guess…. Why are you looking at me like that?" "You're cute." "Oi. Flirtation later. There's only one bed in this room and it's occupied." 

It was late August and Katsumi was missing it, but it wasn't like there was really anything that he could do about it. He'd missed most of the real heat, which was something of a relief, and the temperature this afternoon was almost bearable outside, agreeably warm inside. 

He wasn't even that bored at the moment. He lay on one side on top of the bedsheets, his chin resting on one hand, half-wishing he was wearing something slightly more than his pyjamas, and glared in mock-anger at Takafumi, who pushed his glasses back up his nose with one finger before glaring back at Katsumi, who laughed. 

"Don't tell me you're embarrassed. Katsumi Shibuya embarrassed?" "Uh-uh. Not me. But your Kei-chan is. He's blushing. Again." 

Takafumi and Keisuke, his earnest, cripplingly shy boyfriend, sometimes gave the impression of being joined at the hip. Katsumi barely ever saw Takafumi unless Keisuke was there as well. Keisuke didn't appear to go out at all unless he was with Takafumi and seemed to prefer to address the world through him. The pair represented coupledom at it's most scary, we-are-each-other extreme, though they were pretty cute with it. They didn't flaunt their relationship, but had long since stopped bothering denying it (and most people had stopped bothering commenting), and they certainly weren't overly demonstrative. Nonetheless, they were a couple; they came together. Takafumi and Keisuke. Like Sonny and Cher, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde. Saying the names together seemed natural, and to Katsumi it was hard to imagine either with another person or to conceive of a time when they had not been together. They'd been together for longer than he'd known them. 

"He is not blushing." "Is too." 

Why Katsumi was friends with them was a bit harder to work out. They had met totally by chance: Katsumi was at least three years younger than they were and they didn't have all that much in common, despite the character traits he shared with Takafumi. Right now they were probably the closest friends he had. And right now, Katsumi needed friends. He needed people to be uncritical, to do nothing more than understand. He couldn't rely on his family for that. His father hadn't so much as said that he'd brought his situation on himself, but the implication had been there, and it certainly had not been welcome. It hadn't helped at all. 

Then again, in these sorts of situations, family were sometimes the worst people to turn to. 

"Katsumi, why would he be blushing anyway?" "We're both embarrassing people, and you can embarrass Kei by saying 'hi' to him… ah. There. See?" "Oh, yeah." 

And privately, Katsumi was jealous of them both. 

*** 

Koji spotted him instantly. The same type of person as Katsumi was: quite plainly not Katsumi, but equally anxious, equally out of place. Though this boy was perhaps a little taller than Katsumi had been he was obviously a few years younger: he shouldn't have been there at all, he should have been at home with his parents arguing over midterms. The kind of person, Koji thought, who probably looks better in school uniform than out of it. 

He was standing by the door, looking anxious. Not at all expectant, just unsure if he was happy there, looking round the room more in curiosity than anything else. He'd probably heard the same stories Katsumi had. He'd probably heard about what had happened to Katsumi - the latest cautionary tale, Koji supposed. He could hardly fail to have done if he came to this bar often. 

Glancing questioningly toward Izumi, Koji saw his lover nod once, an almost imperceptible motion you would not have seen if you weren't looking out for it. Yes, he'll do. Not exactly a looker unless you were seriously into high-school boys, but what the hell, does it matter? 

Late August, almost September - a hint of autumn in the suddenly much cooler air. Despite their stated intentions, Koji hadn't actually seriously set out looking for anyone to - well, for someone to kill - until a few days ago, waiting for the rumours circulating about what had happened to Katsumi to run their course and die down of their own accord. It had worked, the stories had been forgotten and people started to get less cautious. The feeling in the bar seemed to be that some transient weirdo had been the one who'd committed the crime, and that he had to be long gone by now. Besides, a few weeks ago Koji had found out that Katsumi was now well out of danger, was alive and most likely to be staying that way, as had most of the other people in the bar. Callous though it sounded, there would have been far more mileage in the story had he died, as it was it had run out of steam. You couldn't get much of a conversation out of it, that was for sure. Now he could safely make a move. 

"Can I buy you a drink?" Koji asked. 

Part 5 


	5. Chapter 5

**Killing Time, Part 5**

The boy's name was Kimie. It didn't really suit him, if you asked Koji. It didn't matter. Koji had called him 'kid'. Izumi didn't call him anything. They hadn't known him for more than a few hours and they wouldn't know him for much longer, so was there any real problem if they called him by the correct name or not? 

Kimie lay in the bath in a few inches of water, his head resting on the side, one hand hanging over the edge, blood running off his fingers and down the side of the tub. His eyes were closed, his breathing laboured and shallow. The water he lay in was bloody; there were bloodstains - handprints - on the tiled walls, the sides of the bath. Most were Koji's. Kimie hadn't been possessed of the strength to fight him off, though he'd tried. Twice the boy had grabbed at the blade of Koji's knife and had succeeded only in cutting his fingers almost to the bone. 

It had been easy enough to get him back to the flat. Koji had got him drunk. After a short discussion with Izumi a couple of days previous, Koji had come to the conclusion that it might be easier this way. As suspected, the neighbours had wondered who had been screaming the night Koji had brought Katsumi home. What were you two doing last night? Killing someone? He'd made too much noise. They could get away with it once, not again. 

Koji, dressed in a bathrobe and kneeling near the unconscious boy, looked up questioningly at Izumi, who frowned slightly. Things weren't progressing quite as planned. At first, everything had advanced without a single problem. It had been easy enough to get Kimie talking. A few loaded questions revealed that he had no idea of what had happened to Katsumi - it turned out that tonight was only the second time he'd been to the bar. He'd heard the cautionary tales, sure, but he had no idea that anything untoward had happened to anyone who came in this bar in the last few weeks. He'd turned out to have a fairly low tolerance to alcohol and had ended up very drunk very quickly. He'd been having difficulty keeping his eyes open when he'd made his excuses, probably realising he'd drunk a fair bit more than he'd intended to and wondering what he'd say to his parents. Koji had let him go, leaving the bar a few minutes later and meeting up with him outside. He hadn't got very far - he was practically asleep on his feet and had put up no protest when Koji got him to his car, where Izumi had met them. He'd slept through the journey and hadn't thought to question what was happening. 

So far, so good. 

Once back at the flat Koji had raped him. Izumi hadn't been too happy about it but had let it slide as long as it got Koji in the right mood. Kimie had been too drunk to put up any real resistance but he'd known what was happening and hadn't wanted any of it, he hadn't been too happy about it either. That wasn't too surprising. Like Katsumi, he'd been a virgin before going home with Koji. 

It had been much the same as it had with Katsumi. Again, Koji hadn't thought he'd be able to do it and again he'd surprised himself. He'd wondered if it had perhaps been a one-off, more to do with Katsumi than to do with the situation, but he'd felt the same exhilaration, the same feeling of total power, had experienced the same loss of control, though it hadn't shown itself in frenzy this time. He'd stayed calm. 

And once again he hadn't killed the boy. 

"You're not cutting the right places." Izumi said clinically. He leant against the basin holding the bloodied kitchen knife that he had, a few minutes previously, picked off the bathroom floor, between thumb and forefinger and looking critically at Kimie. "You're missing the arteries. Didn't you pay any attention in biology lessons?" "Izumi, I…" Koji began, then tailed off. He didn't know what to say, couldn't finish the sentence. 

Once the rage had passed, Koji didn't know if he could kill this boy either. 

"You what? Don't tell me you don't want to do it now." Izumi looked scornful. "He's just some kid. You don't even know him this time. He doesn't matter." Koji turned to face Izumi, resting his head against the bath tiles. "He'll be missed," he said. "It's not a good idea. It's a really, really bad idea, Izumi." "He's probably already been missed. He's yet another middle-class wannabe rebel. You really think the world will miss one of them?" "I can't kill him." Koji said. It was true. "I might have been able to, but not now. He's just a kid. It's not fair." 

Izumi snorted. "Move." Still holding the kitchen knife between thumb and forefinger. In a mild daze, Koji got to his feet, watching as Izumi knelt next to the bath and looked down at the boy, now tightly gripping the knife, holding it to his throat. Hesitating. 

Izumi dropped the knife on the floor. 

"It's not safe," he said after a beat. "You were right, you know. We can't kill him any more than we could your Kazumi. We don't know what we'd do next. Why don't you ever think things through? Get him out of here." 

*** 

"Oniichan, are you sure about this? After everything that's happened!" 

Katsumi had been out of hospital for two and a half weeks when he decided to leave home. The atmosphere at home had been bad enough before Koji, and if anything, it had soured since then. There had been an argument waiting to happen for weeks and after days of barely talking at all, his father had finally broken the tension. Arguments weren't unusual, but this time it had been somehow worse. There had been too much said. They'd both been too… too honest with each other. 

"Didn't I warn you? Didn't I say it was dangerous to carry on the way you were? I don't know where I went wrong with you, Katsumi, I really don't." "You were never around to do anything wrong! You've barely even spoken to me except to tell me off since I was eight years old! The only reason you give a damn now is because you're worried about our reputation!" "This family will be lucky if it still has a reputation after the way you've behaved. Don't you have any sense?" "It's my fault someone tried to kill me, then? What do you think I did, walk up to the local weirdo and ask him to play rough or something?" "These things don't happen for no reason, Katsumi." 

No way out. Nothing more to say. 

"Oh. Hi, Madoka." Katsumi said distractedly. No, he didn't think he would take the stuffed toy cat. Madoka could keep it and give it to any kid she might feel like having. She'd always liked it better than he had anyway. "You're really leaving?" Madoka asked. "Yeah. As soon as I've done packing." After a brief silence, he picked up a pile of books and thrust them into her arms. "Do you still want these? I don't need them now." "What about college? How will you live?" Madoka asked, attempting to steady the precariously balanced pile she held in her arms. 

College fees, at least, were one thing he didn't have to worry about. Katsumi's maternal grandfather had died when he was fifteen, leaving him a fairly sizeable sum of money that had been put aside for precisely that purpose. Katsumi had always found his family's wealth mildly embarrassing but now it was a comfort as well as a promise of freedom. 

"Madoka, I'm an adult. And you are not my mother. I'll get another part-time job or something." "But…" she sighed. It was pointless trying to argue with Katsumi when he'd made up his mind to do something. "Can I still see you?" He smiled. "I'll tell you where I'm living as soon as I know where it is." "Where will you go tonight?" "I'm going to stay with Takafumi until I get someplace else to live." He balanced the toy cat on the top of the books Madoka had finally managed to stabilise, knocking a couple to the floor. "Whoops. Damn. Sorry." 

"Oniichan, you're an idiot." Madoka said. "Yeah. I know." Katsumi gave her a small, tight smile then turned away with a sigh. *** 

"So, why'd you go? Did your father kick you out or something? That's a bit harsh, even for him. You're still sick." 

Takafumi looked at Katsumi in mild amazement. His friend was tired, clearly in no state to be doing something like leaving home. In no state to be doing anything much, really. He should still really have been taking things very slowly. But this was Katsumi. Katsumi, whose first question to the doctors after coming round had been 'when can I go home?'. Katsumi, who had pestered him into going out less than a week after he'd been discharged. Who didn't seem to know the meaning of the phrase 'take things slowly'. He'd already been back at college for four days - totally ignoring doctors' orders. 

Katsumi hadn't wanted to go out alone, though. He hadn't been able to drink because of the painkillers he had still been taking. Halfway through the evening he'd spent a few minutes in the toilets changing a bandage. He'd nearly fallen asleep on two occasions. And he'd been unable to properly relax. 

"No. I left." Katsumi replied. "We had an argument. He as good as said it was my fault that…" He broke off. "Ouch. I can understand why you left." Takafumi pulled a face. "Families, eh?" 

Takafumi hadn't spoken to his own parents since he was Katsumi's age himself, when his mother had finally become aware of the neighbourhood gossip about her son and his so-called best friend and had told him, with the full approval of her husband and daughter, that she no longer wanted him at home, that she no longer had a son. Of course, she hadn't just said that. Both she and his father had spent over three hours yelling at him. During the course of the argument he had been called a pervert at least fourteen times, they had both asked him where they'd gone wrong and his repeated claims that he wasn't sick had been met with considerable scepticism. All things considered, Takafumi thought he was better off out of it. 

"Families." Katsumi agreed, then sobered, suddenly anxious. "I'm won't be in the way or anything will I? I mean, if it's inconvenient…" "No, it's not a big deal. These things happen." 

Katsumi had been about to make a comment about night visits when Keisuke opened the door and abruptly killed that line of conversation. Or would have done. Takafumi, however, said something about threesomes and made both Keisuke and Katsumi blush. 

*** 

Sat on the sofa, Koji twisted a strand of wet hair round his finger and frowned, staring at the slightly discoloured spot on the carpet. They hadn't ultimately been able to move the sofa over the stain, as it was too obvious that it had been moved. It aggravated him and Izumi considered it a potentially fatal sticking point in their claims to know nothing whatsoever about what had happened to Katsumi: not that anyone had actually asked them so far. There was nothing to connect them to Kimie at all. Under Izumi's directions, they'd dumped him in a side street where he had been found by a salaryman ten minutes later. Like Katsumi he'd refused to die, something that Izumi seemed to be taking personally. 

How come either of them was still alive was a mystery. Katsumi was alive enough for Koji to have seen him on a station platform frowning over a difficult passage in some kind of medical textbook. He hadn't even known that the boy was out of hospital, let alone back at college. Admittedly, he had looked pretty pale and sick. Kimie had been conscious for days. He'd been less badly hurt than Katsumi had been, though he was still heavily sedated for the pain. More importantly, to Izumi's mind, he claimed to be unable to remember what the men he had gone home with had looked like. Though Koji didn't know it, he was lying: like Katsumi he was afraid to tell anyone what he knew. 

"It's no surprise they're both alive." Koji said in an attempt to stop Izumi from shouting. "They were both young and healthy." "What, so we need to find someone old and sick?" Izumi said. "Where, exactly, do you think you'll find a geriatric party boy, Koji? And why would we want to kill that?" "Why not try an acid casualty?" Koji asked. "No." Izumi said, his voice low. "Next time you're going to do it properly." Koji sighed. "You said that about the second. We can't. We don't know what to do with them afterwards." "We'll get rid of the body." "How?" Koji asked. You couldn't burn a body the way they had Kimie and Katsumi's clothes and for all the grim jokes he had made about leaving bodies in the street for the dustmen to take away Koji knew you couldn't do that, not really. "What are we going to do, then? Fake a car crash? Burial at sea? For heavens' sake, Izumi. Bodies float and there's no way you could get stab wounds in a car crash." Izumi hesitated. That was the problem. The major advantage with people living was that you didn't have to wonder what you did with them. The disposal of a healthy adult male, or for that matter an adult female, was never going to be easy. 

"We'll work something out," said Izumi. "And we'll do it soon." 

And they would, that much was obvious just from his tone. 

*** 

The only reason Hisaya had managed to trace Katsumi at all was that his father had been out when he called to ask how he was, and therefore it had been Madoka who'd picked the phone up on him. His father would have denied all knowledge of Katsumi's whereabouts. Madoka had given him Takafumi's phone number. 

"Who was that who picked the phone up?" he asked when he finally managed to get through to Katsumi. "Just Keisuke. You know him. Takafumi's boyfriend, remember? He's… well, he's not great with telephones." Katsumi replied, trying not to laugh at Keisuke's mortified expression. He really felt for that guy sometimes. Keisuke just didn't seem cut out for modern life. "Why didn't you tell me you were out of hospital? And what's with the ménage a trois?" "Um." Katsumi fiddled with the phone cord. "I've kinda left home. This is just till I manage to find a flat." "Damn fine sense of timing you have." Hisaya said, suppressing a laugh. "You've been talking about it for months so why'd you do it just after some guy tried to…" "Oi. Enough already." Katsumi cut him off. "Okay, okay. Cool it." Hisaya privately wondered what Katsumi was in a mood about. "Look, are you free tomorrow night?" "Why do you ask?" "I wondered if we could meet up." "Okay. Good idea. Where?" Hisaya hesitated, then spoke as if he was pleased to have solved a tricky problem. "I thought we could go to that bar. The underground one. It's cool there." 

Hisaya had found that the atmosphere of the bar had grown on him. He may have found it mildly intimidating at first, but one night a few days after Katsumi had been admitted to hospital, he had gone back there with Eri - totally by chance they had been in the area and Eri had wanted to see what it was like, she'd heard so much about it from him. Hisaya had agreed, if it made her happy, fully expecting her to hate the place. To his surprise, Eri had loved it and insisted that they came back there. After an initial feeling of unease, Hisaya had found he liked it too. 

"…Sure. Sounds fine to me," Katsumi heard himself say. 

Part 6 


	6. Chapter 6

**Killing Time, Part 6**

Katsumi didn't want to be back in that dingy bar where it had all began, and his body language showed it. Why he had ever agreed to come back was quite beyond him, but for some reason Hisaya seemed to have grown to like the bar as much as Katsumi had come to hate it and had wanted to meet him there. There, of all places. To Katsumi it seemed worse than insensitive, but maybe Hisaya just hadn't realised what it meant to him now. Maybe Hisaya hadn't even realised it had been Koji who'd tried to kill him, not just some prowling maniac who'd picked him up the evening it all happened. It was just as crowded as he remembered it being and made him feel claustrophobic. When he'd met up with Hisaya, he was never going to set foot in this place again. 

He looked around the room edgily, much as he had done the first time he came there. It hadn't changed much. The posters, for all that they now advertised different events, still promised the same low-rent thrills, it still hurt if you sat on the chairs for longer than five minutes, the clientele still gave him a feeling of vague, inexplicable menace which now alarmed rather than intrigued him. The only thing that seemed to have changed was Katsumi himself. The minute Hisaya showed up, they were leaving. If he wanted to come here so badly, he could come back later. It wasn't as if Katsumi wanted to be out long, he didn't want to worry Keisuke. Poor Keisuke. He'd looked so anxious when Katsumi had told him where he was going… almost as anxious as Katsumi had felt. Unconsciously, he bit one of his fingernails, something he normally only did when feeling extremely nervous. Maybe he should have dyed his hair back to black, it was far less distinctive, but the blonde had grown on him. On the other hand, if he was worried about being distinctive, why the hell was he wearing shorts? Because you're perverse, he thought, and you like the attention. He looked at his watch for the third time in almost as many minutes. Maybe Hisaya wasn't going to show. Maybe he should just go… 

He didn't spot Koji until the man was practically next to him, by which point it was rather too late to do anything about it. 

"Katsumi?" Koji sounded almost as shocked as Katsumi felt. "What are you doing here?" 

It was crowded here, it was a public place. Surely Koji wouldn't dare do anything. "I…" Katsumi began, hating the way his voice trembled slightly. "I'm waiting for a friend." "Like you were the first time we met?" Koji's voice was quiet. "It's the same friend. He always stands me up." Katsumi said, and giggled slightly hysterically. He had a craft knife in his jacket pocket that he'd taken from Keisuke's worryingly tidy desk and he closed his hand round it. Its presence reassured him. He'd expected to find himself terrified of knives when he got out of hospital, but strangely it hadn't happened. "You're frightened," Koji said in the same tone of voice. "You tried to kill me, of course I'm frightened!" This sounded so ridiculous that Katsumi began to laugh again, the same edge of hysteria painfully noticeable. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you." Half-wanting to tell Katsumi that he'd never really wished to hurt him. That's right, blame Izumi, he mentally rebuked himself. You got a kick out of it too, admit it. You fantasised about raping this kid the night you met him. "If you want to talk, let's get out of here." Katsumi said. He still held the knife in his pocket, so tightly it dug into the palm of his hand. "What about your drink?" Koji asked. He wasn't surprised Katsumi wanted to get out. The place had too many unpleasant associations, as Koji himself did. Katsumi shrugged. "It's tap water. I wasn't intending on getting drunk tonight. Not here. I… well, I really don't like the idea of getting drunk in here." 

A statement Kimie Mori would have readily agreed to had he been able. 

*** 

Koji had wanted to go to a hotel, but Katsumi had refused. He felt safer in public. Again, Koji was unsurprised that Katsumi was unwilling to be properly alone with him. They had ended up standing on a bridge between two office buildings. Katsumi leant on the parapet and looked out at the cars in the twilight. He thought dusk was probably his favourite time of day when the streetlights were on but you didn't really need them, when everything had a slightly ghostly aura, even Koji. He didn't want to meet Koji's eyes - killers' eyes, as he now thought of them. Narrow. Emotionless. Impossible to read. He had once found them fascinating, but now they scared him. Maybe that had always been the reason why Koji had fascinated him - precisely because something about him was frightening, although at the time he'd had no idea what it was. 

"You've lost weight." Koji said inconsequentially. "You're too thin." "Hospital food." A glimpse of the old Katsumi, gone almost before Koji realised it had even surfaced. "You tried to kill him, didn't you?" He looked away so Koji wouldn't see his expression, which he felt sure was one of confusion. "It was you and Izumi hurt that boy Mori." To Koji he suddenly looked very young, a slender, delicate child leaning on the parapet of a bridge with his back to him, wearing a coat a couple of sizes too large for him - and practically the twin of the one Koji had wrapped round him on that night in mid July - his hair hanging in front of his face, unconsciously defensive. Too fragile. Like he'd break if you touched him. "How do you know about Mori?" Koji asked, a dangerous tone in his voice. "The police told me about it a few days after I'd been discharged because it was so similar to what happened to me. They wanted me to press charges but they didn't tell me that much. I asked Takafumi about it later and after he'd finished talking I straightaway thought 'Koji'." Katsumi laughed and it sounded wrong. "No one else knows. I only know because I worked it out, though that hardly needed an Einstein. Why didn't you kill him?" Katsumi paused for a moment. "Why didn't you kill me?" It was a question that had nagged at him ever since he'd regained consciousness. Koji smiled sadly. "I liked you. Maybe loved you a bit. You were scared. I couldn't do it. And Kimie… Kimie was just a kid. He reminded me of you." Katsumi frowned, and turned to face him. "Then why try?" He was surprised by the anger in his own voice. "If you can't go through with killing people, then why bother?" Unconsciously, he placed one hand in his coat pocket again and felt reassured by the craft knife. Koji, however, had other things on his mind. "Who is Takafumi?" "Who is who?" "Takafumi. You mentioned him just now." "A friend." Katsumi said bluntly. He didn't want Koji knowing anything more about Takafumi and Keisuke. He didn't want Koji to ruin two more lives. 

The news made Koji feel a faint stab of curiosity. Katsumi's friend Takafumi. He'd never thought of Katsumi having friends or any kind of social life when he wasn't with him. The realisation that Katsumi had a life of his own, that the boy had been able to put what had happened behind him, or at least was attempting to, and moving on, made him feel slighted. Maybe killing him would have been the right thing to do. At least then he could have ensured that he never made him and his actions seem like a drop in the ocean. For a brief moment he considered pushing him off the parapet of the bridge, but realised it would have been no more possible to kill Katsumi now than it had been on that humid July night that now felt so long ago. 

Maybe Katsumi was right. Maybe he wasn't a killer. But in that case why had he felt a satisfaction, first with Katsumi then with Kimie? It seemed to Koji that he'd gone the wrong way about things. His finer feelings had complicated things - the fact that he actually liked the people he had tried to kill. Although he hadn't known Kimie long, he'd seemed a nice kid. If he met someone for whom he had no feelings whatsoever, someone who had no meaning for him except as a potential victim, then maybe it would be different. Maybe if he met someone who seemed to be asking for it. Neither Katsumi or Kimie had asked. They'd found something they hadn't even been looking for. But to do what he did to someone who had genuinely been playing with fire, rather than anxiously considering it… 

The thought excited him. 

Katsumi turned round again. "I'm going home," he said suddenly. "I won't see you again." He found it a colossal relief to say something so definite out loud, and Koji found he was relieved too. There had been something different about Katsumi tonight, something Koji didn't really like. His tension, maybe. Whilst Katsumi the person was still alive, it was as if Koji had managed to kill the boy he'd known and there was something insubstantial about what had been left behind. 

*** 

'Why try? If you can't go through with killing people, then why bother?' 

As he walked back into the bar - Izumi would be there by now - Koji couldn't help but think of what Katsumi had said to him. He'd never thought of himself as that kind of person, but the high he got, the power he felt, when he had someone completely at his mercy, was addictive. Even if he wasn't a killer yet, he had power. He could change people. He'd changed Katsumi - the Katsumi he'd met that evening had been a stranger to him. He'd probably changed Kimie. Me, he thought. I did it. 

The more he thought of it, the more he found he wanted to do it again. As soon as possible, this week, tonight, now. 

Izumi, he knew, was totally dispassionate about what they did, though he wasn't the one who'd found both their victims to date, and he stayed detached during the actual process. 

That was about to change. 

Looking across the room from the steps which led down into the bar, Koji spotted Izumi almost immediately. It wasn't hard. Izumi was a tall young man, not to mention that Koji would have recognised him anywhere. He was, at present, standing by the bar with a young couple Koji got the vaguest feeling that he had seen before. A young man of about his age, and a strident blonde girl who was obviously flirting with Izumi, to the displeasure of her male companion who was presumably her boyfriend. Normally, he would have gone across and taught her some manners, preferably with a beer glass, but something told him to hold back - for now. The girl herself was a little the worse for wear but the young man was quite disgustingly sober and rather aggrieved, to go by his expression. It surely wouldn't be long before he cut out on the business and indeed, as Koji watched, the young man made a last-ditch attempt to get the drunken girl to pay him some attention, but to no avail. Eventually he pulled a disgusted face and left the girl with Izumi. Judging by the young man's behaviour, this sort of thing had happened many times before. 

Koji realised, after a beat, that the man had reached the steps and was looking at him as if trying to work out where he had seen him before. He was almost as tall as Koji himself was, which came as a bit of a surprise to him. He was used to looking down on people, not at them. 

"Excuse me." The man was talking to him. "Aren't you Koji Nanjo?" "Yes, I am. What do you want?" Koji asked. Politely, he hoped. No need to be rude. Yet. "I was meant to be meeting a friend here…" he began, hesitantly. "I was wondering if you'd seen him." Koji realised his looks were deceptive - he was quite a bit younger than he appeared. A boy, not really a man at all. "What does he look like?" Koji asked, out of curiosity. His companion paused. "He looks about sixteen, dyes his hair blonde, dresses strangely… he's probably a bit too pale. He just got out of hospital. His name's Shibuya, he used to meet you here." Koji had to resist the impulse to smile. So this was the friend who never showed up. Koji had begun to suspect he'd been a figment of Katsumi's imagination, but clearly he was real enough to talk. "You mean Katsumi Shibuya? Oh, he was here, but I saw him leave about an hour ago. Sorry." Koji did smile now, apologetically. He hadn't known he was such a convincing liar, not that he'd really been lying, but still… move over Izumi. The young man smiled back at him. "Thanks. I think I'll go too. This evening's been a bit of a waste of time." He looked back into the bar. "First Shibuya doesn't show, them my girlfriend starts putting the moves on some brown-haired guy. Thought I'd leave her to it." "Aren't you worried about her?" He shrugged. "Eri can look after herself," he replied, then walked quickly up the stairs. 

Could she now? 

"It's scary!" the girl was saying as Koji walked up to Izumi and smiled at him. The girl grinned sloppily back, clearly thinking he was smiling at her. "But I feel safer with you!" She gazed intently at Koji, her eyes slightly glassy. Behind her back, Izumi rolled his eyes whilst Koji only just managed to stop himself from laughing in the stupid girl's face. "What is?" he finally managed to ask. "Eri's been telling me about those two kids who got hurt. Apparently her boyfriend knew one of them from school." Izumi said, quickly affecting an air of boredom. "You know. The blonde one. Eri here thinks he had it coming for a long time." "The only connection between them is that they both went to this bar!" Eri squealed. "Do you reckon there's, like, some kind of serial killer coming here?" Izumi gave Koji a discreet glance which as much as said 'don't you dare open your mouth'. "I told her it was hardly likely." "Maybe he doesn't like gay teenagers or something?" Eri continued, blithely ignoring Izumi. "Or maybe he's, like, totally maladjusted!" 

Izumi looked at Koji and smiled slightly ferally, then turned back to the drunken blonde girl, who was giggling inanely at him. Playing with fire and she had to know it. For Izumi and he, third time lucky. Two dry runs - an abortive crime of passion, an equally abortive attempt at homicide. As soon as possible, this week, tonight, now. 

*** 

Hisaya knew it wasn't really any of his business what Eri did. She was his girlfriend, not his prisoner, and if she wanted to play around that was her affair. It had been his suggestion that they have an open relationship, after all, and it was hardly like it was unusual for her to want to take off home with another guy. But something about Izumi had worried him. He couldn't say what it was but he worried him. 

He stood a few feet away on the other side of the pavement, half-hidden by shadow, watching the people who milled around the entrance to the bar. None of them looked that dangerous but he knew… one of them at least had to be. Katsumi had gone to this bar the night he was stabbed. Then there'd been that boy Mori. He'd gone to the bar as well and had endured the same treatment Katsumi had. Either a copycat, or the same person: sometimes they come back. Both had been young, new to this kind of thing and kind of cute. True, they'd both been boys, but still he felt anxious for Eri. He knew what she was like… she'd go home with that Izumi, but he wanted to make sure she was safe before he went home. 

Here. He'd been waiting for over an hour when she finally walked out. Alone. That was unusual. He was about to call out to her when he saw a man walk up to her and she grabbed drunkenly at his arm for support. He caught a few snatches of their conversation. Eri… get the car… certainly… it didn't make much sense until he saw a car pull up and a third figure join them, tall, strangely familiar for all that he couldn't see him clearly, half-hidden by shadow as he was. He held the car door open for Eri, an exaggerated gesture of courtesy, then walked to the front, the first man grabbing his sleeve. 

"… anyone see you leave, Izumi?" 

They'd walked closer to him. He could hear them more clearly now if he concentrated hard. The second spoke more quietly, he couldn't catch much. 

"No… see any… than you, Koji." 

Koji. Katsumi's Koji. That was why he'd looked familiar. Their conversation only served to worry him further. He considered phoning his friend, asking where Koji had lived but how? He had to do something… he turned away, wondering if there was a phone box. But was there time for that? 

"You like to listen in on other people's conversations, huh?" They'd seen him but did he mind? He hadn't heard them walk up to him and he turned to face the pair, more angry than sensible. These two had Eri. "You like to play around with other people's girlfriends?" Koji laughed. "Cute. She's your girlfriend, huh? Tell her to keep her hands off other people's boyfriends in future. She could get into trouble that way." He slipped one arm around Izumi's waist and the smaller man smiled at him, an unexpected softening, but when he turned to Hisaya there was only naked hostility visible in his cold, angry eyes. "She wanted to come home with us, Mr White Knight." Izumi added. "You want to come with us too? Make sure she doesn't get into any trouble? Or do you just want to apologise for intruding and run off home?" "She's my girlfriend." Hisaya said stubbornly. Koji grabbed his upper arm the way he had grabbed Katsumi's. His grip hurt Hisaya but he refused to show that it had. "Good, then you'll come with us." Izumi said. 

There was no danger for them, the street had been practically deserted. They had not been seen. If anything, the discussion had seemed more like a drunken confrontation than anything serious. Far safer, too, to take the boyfriend home with them too than have him poking around, asking where his stupid little girlfriend was. Asking them if they'd seen her: 'She was with you last, what happened to her?' Let him come too. This added a dimension, a new twist to an already familiar story. Eri can look after herself… but can her boyfriend? If Katsumi had it coming, Eri certainly did as well. 

"I wonder what Hisaya's doing," said Katsumi Shibuya. 

Part 7 


	7. Chapter 7

**Killing Time, Part 7**

Nine o'clock on a cold, rainy Saturday morning and everything changes. Breathing deeply in an attempt to calm himself, Koji washed his hands in the kitchen sink and watched the water turn a light pink, as he had done the day he tried to clean Katsumi's blood out of the living-room carpet. Blood. Out, damn spot. He'd catch himself compulsively washing his hands and sleepwalking if he wasn't careful. But for now… he had to wash them. The soap was covered in a thin webbing of bloody bubbles; the taps were smeared with it. Not my blood, Koji thought. Never my blood. Funny how they never fight back, not really. They let it happen. Like the minute they walk through the door of the flat it just becomes inevitable and they know it and never try to struggle. Katsumi had been caught off-guard, Kimie drunk, Hisaya and Eri totally oblivious, but they'd all seemed almost to welcome it, somehow. Koji would have raged against it. Why just let it happen? 

Okay, so Katsumi and Kimie had been naïve, but they were hardly self-destructive. They simply hadn't spotted any malice in Koji because they wouldn't have seen it in anyone. Izumi had said that Kimie would probably have gone home with Jack the Ripper if he'd had a nice smile. Call it sweet if you like but it had still been dangerous - if nothing else, those boys had learnt caution. Eri had seen the danger and liked it, flirted with it. Hisaya definitely had but refused to acknowledge it. It didn't make any sense: why just submit to it? 

Drying his hands on a towel, he walked back into the bathroom where Izumi was waiting for him, standing quiet and mildly shocked. 

The smell of blood was almost unbearable and it made him want to gag. I did that. We did that. Izumi held the knife now, gripping it tightly. Now what do we do? 

They'd killed Eri first; or rather Eri had died first. Like Kimie she'd been too drunk to put up much of a fight. Or maybe she just hadn't wanted to. They didn't know. Izumi had done it, wielding the knife like a scientist, treating her like an object lesson in the way it should be done. See, Koji? He'd remained coldly clinical, even when his hands and shirt were stained with blood. 

Hisaya had struggled, angry with him, yelling his girlfriend's name. He'd tried to hit Izumi and Koji had reacted, lashing out blindly and breaking Hisaya's nose. Effective even in the midst of total rage and Izumi had smiled at him and told him he still had it even if he was totally hopeless a lot of the time and Koji had smiled back and kissed him whilst Hisaya lay on the floor a few feet away, bloodstained hands over his smashed face. 

"Love hurts," Izumi had said prosaically, and twisted the knife. Koji regarded him with the air of a connoisseur, which in this respect he could well have been. Curious to see how Izumi went about it, what the differences were, and there were differences. Izumi was slower, deliberate, calculating. Didn't appear to suffer from the same rages Koji felt, or just kept them under control better. 

But going by his shock, maybe he'd just remained totally detached and was having just as hard a time as Koji was in coming to terms with it. He'd felt guilt over his part in Shibuya's… well, what did you call it? Not death; assault was far too mild a term for what had happened to him. Attempted murder? Was that what you called it? And even that didn't cover it all. Izumi sometimes forgot that Koji had raped Shibuya as well as trying to kill him. Shibuya, who - for all that he hadn't really done anything to Izumi - had fallen in love with Koji, who Izumi had at least possessed some reason for feeling resentful towards. 

Izumi looked around the bathroom again. He hadn't had any reason to do anything to this couple, though they had angered him for some reason. Why was it that even now he felt more upset over Shibuya and the Mori boy, who were both still alive after all? Why feel that this couple had somehow deserved this when neither had done anything more than be themselves in his presence? 

Koji had killed Hisaya. Compared to her boyfriend, Eri's death had been easy, almost peaceful. Koji was, after all, a far more emotional creature than Izumi. Felt everything so much more strongly. When Koji was angry you knew it. 

They were both quite dead, no denying that. 

"What do we do now?" Izumi asked. He sounded frightened and if Izumi sounded frightened it had to be bad. Koji shoved the hair out of his face. "Get rid of them, I suppose. He looked at his watch. "But we can't do it now. It's too late. People will see. We'll have to do it early tomorrow morning." Izumi paled "You mean we've got to sit in here all day with…" he gestured helplessly round the bathroom, taking in the bloodstains on the walls and floor, the ravaged body in the bath where Kimie, unlike the new occupant still immediately recognisable as the boy they'd met earlier that evening, had lain before, the body by his own feet. The sickly smell in the air, which would only get worse. "We don't have to stay in here." Koji said. It sounded lame. He couldn't have done this to Katsumi or Kimie. Not them. No way, no how. 

*** 

Elsewhere, life went on as normal. 

In his own apartment a few miles away, Keisuke held the telephone to his shoulder and looked awkward. He really didn't like telephones. He didn't like being unable to see the face of the person he was talking to. Keisuke, despite his shyness, was very good at reading peoples' body language, and didn't like having to rely on voice alone to work out the subtleties of a conversation. It seemed to him that it was too easy to hide when speaking on the phone. Keisuke often came out with things like that and usually he meant it. A visible sign of what Takafumi had once called 'quiet high weirdness'. 

"Katsumi? You've got another phone call." 

Katsumi dumped the textbook he had been attempting to work up some kind of an interest in on the sofa, secretly rather grateful for the interruption. He wondered if there was any way of making these stupid textbooks a little more accessible to the average high-school graduate before relieving Keisuke of the telephone. 

Keisuke was privately very grateful that the call wasn't for him, though at the same time he felt bad for thinking that. He had a bad feeling about it, there'd been something… but he couldn't quite say what. Frowning slightly he made his way into the kitchen where Takafumi was being domestic, to be joined a few minutes later by a rather puzzled Katsumi. 

"Who was that on the phone?" Keisuke asked curiously. "Hisaya's dad." Katsumi replied. "Apparently he hasn't come home yet and he's not round Eri's and he wondered if I'd seen him. Which I haven't." Keisuke blinked. "Eri?" Takafumi put his recipe book down and tried to explain. "You've met her twice. She's the blonde girl who hangs around with Hisaya. His girlfriend. There really is no accounting for taste, I suppose…" "Oh, I remember her." "Hisaya probably likes her because she makes him look smart." Takafumi continued. "Don't be a bitch, Takafumi," Keisuke said mildly, then turned back to Katsumi. "Didn't you say you were meant to be meeting Hisaya last night?" "Meant to be, yeah. He never showed. Didn't feel like hanging around to wait for him." 

There didn't seem to be much to say to that. 

"I wonder what he's doing." Takafumi said. "But knowing those two they probably got held up somewhere and we all know what that means." "Don't they have school today?" Keisuke asked curiously. Takafumi thought for a moment before replying. "Not this week. But it's not like that's ever bothered them overmuch before." "They're probably making the most of it. Maybe they went to a hotel." Katsumi said. "They've done it plenty of times before. Eri's mother thinks her friendship with Hisaya is totally innocent." 

"There are none so blind, but then again I suppose my mother thought all my relationships were totally innocent, so maybe it's just a mother thing." Takafumi turned back to jis book and the cupboards. "Keisuke, what's paprika and do we have any or will I need to go shopping?" 

*** 

Izumi had been shopping, though he hadn't enjoyed it. It had been a matter of necessity. But at the same time it got him out of the charnel house of his flat, so there had been that to say for it. He'd discussed it with Koji and come to the conclusion that they didn't have what they needed for the job. They'd had no choice. 

He hadn't really wanted to buy a saw but they'd been unable to think of anything else that would have done the job. The kitchen knife certainly wouldn't have (Izumi had found himself keeping it apart from all the other knives they possessed; he couldn't bear the thought of preparing food with it any more). Bathroom cleaner, bleach and a new bath mat, practically identical to the old one: those were essential. Bin bags they already had. A spade: in an attempt to look slightly more like an amateur gardener Izumi had got a trowel, one or two plants and a bag of compost as well. Koji hadn't complained: he understood the motive. 

Neither was looking forward to it, but you couldn't play dangerous games without cleaning up after yourself. 

What now?" Koji asked, quite willingly letting Izumi take control. Izumi, who had been stood at the window, looked over one shoulder at Koji and shook his head. "We wait" He had got over his initial panic in the face of the practicalities of the situation. They didn't have any other option, had to do something about it; they couldn't keep bodies in their flat. Koji went to stand next to Izumi. Outside, a young mother laden down with carrier bags walked home through the drizzle, a small girl carrying a damp stuffed animal in one hand and a child's umbrella in the other following a few paces behind. 

It had been far from a pleasant task. Koji had been nauseous and it was hardly surprising. He didn't like it, didn't like what they'd done. He doubted he'd sleep well tonight. Izumi had hidden it a little better but Koji knew him well enough to know he'd been disturbed by it as well. They'd had difficulties with the bin bags; they hadn't been big enough. Koji hadn't been able to bring himself to touch the saw: Izumi had to do it. Afterwards they'd cleaned the bathroom, burnt the old bath mat. Koji had suggested putting it in one of the bags but Izumi had told him bluntly not to be so bloody stupid. 

It had been early Sunday morning when they, heavily dressed against the cold and possible recognition, got the bags into the boot of Koji's car and they'd driven round in silence for over an hour before Izumi had finally spotted a place to bury them. Maybe not quite six feet under but for a shallow grave it had been reasonably deep. Koji had tried very hard to forget what it was he was actually burying, tried to stay objective. Izumi had resorted to his usual icy detachment. "Should we burn them?" Koji had asked after he'd finished digging the hole. Izumi had hesitated before replying. "No. The smell could linger. It's not a good idea." They'd attempted to camouflage the site afterwards, aided by the rain, which had not eased off. It had made the job harder than it needed to be, but Izumi had been grateful for it. The ground hadn't been that muddy, hopefully by morning their footprints would have either been washed away or be practically obscured. 

"Do you reckon there'll be an investigation?" Koji had asked on the way back. After discarding their coats and in Koji's case his hat, they easily passed for a couple on their way home from an evening out. "Missing-persons most like." Izumi said. "People'll probably think they eloped." He paused. "What were their names again?" "The girl was called Eri Ijima. I forget her boyfriend's name." Koji said. "Before that there was Kimie Mori and Katsumi Shibuya." He didn't know why he added the other two names, but... he couldn't help but remember them. "Four." Izumi said in the manner of a news report. "Two dead, one hospitalised, one… what did happen to Shibuya?" 

Koji shrugged. "I don't know. Probably getting on with his life somewhere and good luck to him." "These two were his friends, right?" Koji laughed. "God. I forgot." Izumi smiled maliciously. "I think we can probably say three dead." 

*** 

Seven days. 

Sunday morning. Nine hours after Koji and Izumi returned home, Eri's mother called the police to report her daughter's disappearance. By midday Hisaya's father had done the same after first calling Katsumi for a fourth time to ask if his son had been in touch. Izumi had been quite right, the suspicion amongst both families had at first been that the couple had eloped; the police had assumed the same thing. 

Monday. Eri's mother had called the police again to ask if there was any news of her daughter. She stressed that Eri 'wasn't the type' to elope: if she had she surely would have called by now just to let her family know where she was. She was a 'considerate' girl, wouldn't dream of worrying her mother like that. She was assured that every possible attempt was being made to trace her daughter. 

By Tuesday afternoon Katsumi, who had never seen himself as a paranoid person, went to the police himself and told them about Hisaya's failure to turn up for the meeting they had arranged. Despite his having the best of intentions, Katsumi's ignorance of the fact that Hisaya had showed up later at the bar had the unforeseen consequence of sending the investigation - decidedly small-scale, low key - down a blind alley. Late editions of a local newspaper carried an article about the disappearances. 

The following morning, with the full knowledge of the police, Mrs. Ijima made a tearful plea on the front page of the same local newspaper, asking her daughter to get in touch. Four other papers picked up the story - the gorgeous young couple laughing in the photographs released and the suddeness of their disappearance gave the story a sex angle; sex sold. Hisaya's father berated the detective in charge of the police investigation for dragging his feet. A group of builders began digging the foundations for a new block of flats on a vacant lot on the outskirts of the city; work had been delayed by a few weeks due to problems with the planning permission. Keisuke fretted, Takafumi told himself it was probably nothing to worry about. Katsumi cried himself to sleep. 

A large number of Thursday's papers carried some kind of story on Hisaya and Eri's disappearance. After the lunch hour, two builders working on site made what reporters the following morning would term 'a grisly discovery'. The police were summoned and roped off the site. The builder who made the find privately voiced his belief that the corpses he discovered were that of the couple who went missing. Reporters showed up at the site; the police were asked if they had prepared some kind of statement, photographs were taken of the scene. Eri and Hisaya's families were informed. Late on Thursday evening a TV news crew did a live broadcast from the site. 

Friday. Media coverage reached saturation levels; the worst-case scenario would sell a lot of papers. Though neither body had been formally identified most agreed that they had to be those of Hisaya and Eri. Koji and Izumi, who were in the habit of listening to the radio during breakfast, argued for over four hours. Both Katsumi and Takafumi stayed home from college; Katsumi was marked down as absent through sickness in a morning tutorial. Keisuke skipped a lecture in order to go home early. Relatives of Hisaya and Eri went to the mortuary in order to identify the bodies. Mrs Ijima fainted. 

Early on Saturday morning the police formally released the identities of the bodies retrieved from the building site; as suspected they were those of Kunihide Hisaya and Eri Ijima. Second editions of the day's papers carried this information. A press conference was held; Mrs Ijima did not attend as she was under sedation in hospital. 

Just over a week later, Katsumi was back in hospital as well. 

Part 8 


	8. Chapter 8

**Killing Time, Part 8**

Before that, there were other things to consider. 

It was funny how little time it took for life to go into turnaround. How seemingly insignificant details could change things. Going out in the evening instead of staying at home. Buying this book rather than that one. Most of the time people didn't think much of the consequences of changing their minds as to what film they were going to see when they actually got to the cinema; the consequences could have been immense but it wasn't the kind of thing people dwelt on. Life is complicated enough without worrying how different it would have been if you'd decided to take the train to work rather than the bus. 

Some decisions are bigger than others. A little thing becomes a big thing. The one day you take the train to work, the train gets held up, cancelled, crashes. The night you decided to go out you meet your soul mate. This book could change your life - and sometimes it's true. Or, in the case of Kimie Mori, going to a different bar, a place you've only ever been in when you were with a friend, by yourself. It should have been a little thing but it became a life-changing experience for all the wrong reasons. Funny how seemingly insignificant details could change things, how talking to the stranger who offered to buy you a drink rather than pretending you couldn't hear, playing it safe, could change your life for the worse. 

It wasn't just Kimie's life, of course not. And it wouldn't just be his friends and family. Koji Nanjo didn't know it yet, but picking up Kimie Mori had been a mistake. 

They'd left Kimie in a side street at twenty past one in the morning. He was only partly dressed; there was no way he would have passed for drunk. According to the doctors ten minutes more on the street would have killed him. That, of course, had been what Izumi had expected would happen. The salaryman who'd found him shouldn't have been up at all but the man, who lived in a flat nearby, had been out with friends; the night had gone on far too long and he had only managed to extricate himself from the group half an hour previously. Maybe if the boy had been fully clothed he would have taken him for drunk, maybe if he'd been less obviously injured, if the man who found him hadn't paused to take out his door keys… 

Neither of those things had happened and Kimie had lived. 

*** 

Kai Kurosaki hadn't heard about what happened to Kimie for three days and he had, in the official way that information of this nature is spread, no real right to know. He hadn't been told about it because nobody thought to tell him. No one had broken it to him gently, told him to sit down. He wouldn't have sat down anyway, he wasn't the type, and he wouldn't have claimed to want to have any bad news broken to him like that. It would have been rather kinder than the way he did find out, though, and he might have appreciated it even if he didn't go so far as to say so. 

Kai was twenty-one. He had oddly-styled blonde hair and a way with make-up only slightly less remarkable than Koji's was; he looked like a young rock star unsuccessfully attempting incognito. He was striking rather than conventionally attractive which didn't bother him in the slightest. Despite being openly bisexual, he had a justified reputation as a womaniser. The last girl he'd gone steady with thought he was a jerk and so did a lot of people who didn't 'get' Kai Kurosaki, as did some of those who knew him well. He hadn't wanted to go to college, it hadn't struck him as all that important when he graduated from high school, and he didn't regret the decision. Kai didn't regret all that much. He liked to look forward, to what he'd do tomorrow, next week, next year. He had no time for regrets. If he didn't make it here, he'd move elsewhere and start over, do that for as long as he had to until he made it work. 

But he'd wanted to do all that with Kimie. His current Mr. Right-Now. 

Kimie had fascinated him from the start. Seventeen years old and innocent, or at least far more so than Kai had been at that age. That had been part of the interest for him, at least at first. The challenge. Trying to seduce a virgin who didn't even know he was being seduced. It had been singularly unsuccessful; Kimie had refused to let Kai so much as kiss him. Kai had persisted, at the outset just to prove he could but after a couple of weeks it had become, somehow, more serious than trying to get a boy he had assumed was rather prudish into bed, somewhere down the line he'd made the mistake of actually liking the boy. But then everything had changed again. Turnaround. 

Sitting down and thinking about it for a while would have led Koji to realise that he knew Kai by sight; the man worked at another bar Koji sometimes went to alone. Kai had met Kimie that way. It was a good job, paid well, and suited him. He preferred the nights, and the general style of the place meant the management didn't mind the way he looked and dressed. It was far better to Kai's mind than having to cut his hair and wear a bow tie to work in one of the supposedly classier and, of course, expensive places uptown. The bar itself did not have a late license, which left Kai with time to go out. This was how Kimie had become acquainted with the subterranean bar Koji and Izumi frequented. 

It was in bar-room gossip that Kai found out what had happened to him. 

The boy had been conscious by the time Kai got to see him, four days after the incident, but he had been under heavy sedation. For the pain, they'd said. Kai had been warned that he would be, but seeing Kimie had come as a shock. It wasn't that he was unrecognisable; the damage to his face had been superficial. It was more that he'd never seen him in such a state. He'd been staring at the ceiling, his hair a tangled mess. The boy's eyes were only half-open and slightly glazed. Occasionally he would blink. His chest and arms were covered in bandages; he had knife wounds on his hands. How in hell did you get knife wounds on your hands? Kai wondered, before realising it was obvious - Kimie must have got them in a pathetic attempt to defend himself. 

"What happened?" Kai had asked with barely restrained anger. He knew from the woman gossiping in the bar where he worked - maybe he'd just wanted a more reliable source. He couldn't believe how angry he felt, or how well he was managing to hide it. 

What happened he knew. What he needed to know was how and who. 

Katsumi Shibuya all over again. 

*** 

Hisaya had been dead for under two weeks when Katsumi told Takafumi, at about ten past eight, that he was going to take a bath. It seemed like a good idea. He was plainly exhausted but still oddly agitated and Takafumi, who had been attempting to take his mind off things by re-reading an old novel, had thought it might help calm him down. 

"Will you be long?" "No. Twenty minutes at the most. See you." Katsumi gave him a vague smile - he hadn't smiled properly in days, since before all this began - before walking into the bathroom, his mind on other things. 

Takafumi picked up his book again and started intently at the pages and couldn't concentrate. He wished Keisuke was here, but he'd gone to his parents' house for the weekend - at least he still got on with his family. He'd met Keisuke's parents on a few occasions, had even gone to stay with them for the New Year. They'd seemed pretty relaxed about having their son's boyfriend staying - both Takafumi and Keisuke had found this more than a little odd. Keisuke had expected his parents to react badly to his relationship with Takafumi, but it hadn't happened that way. They'd been shocked, but they'd got over it. Still, Takafumi wished he were here. He didn't know how to cope. Keisuke would have found it easy to deal with the situation, or rather he'd have found it easier than Takafumi did. Keisuke was good with bad times. 

Bad times. Katsumi was taking it hard. Takafumi worried about him. Hisaya had been murdered and Katsumi seemed… well, it wasn't all grief. He was sad, terribly so. Barely spoke. But that wasn't the whole of it. Takafumi was pretty sure he knew what was going on. Survivor guilt; it had to be. Katsumi had lived and Hisaya had died and he hated being the one who'd been left behind, as it were. It hadn't been hard to work out that Katsumi suspected that whoever it was who had killed Hisaya was the same person who'd tried to kill him. He didn't know why it had been the way it had. Why him and not me? It didn't make any sense to Katsumi, didn't make much more to Takafumi. 

He couldn't have said what impulse it was that had made him go and check on Katsumi. Twenty minutes, he'd said. It hadn't been much more than ten but Takafumi was uneasy. He'd watched the living-room clock, thought a bit too much and read far too little. He'd got up and opened the window, only to close it again three minutes later. Katsumi was worrying him… part of him hadn't even wanted to go and check on his friend for fear of what could have happened. 

"Katsumi? Are you okay?" He paused for a few moments, waiting to be told to get lost. Katsumi didn't like his privacy being invaded at the best of times and this was far from the best of times, but there was no reply. "Katsumi." Takafumi doubted anyone had ever been more eager to be told to piss right off, but there was nothing. Still no answer. 

After hesitating for a short while, he pushed the door open. 

*** 

A few minutes earlier, Katsumi had closed the door, imperfectly, as it later turned out, behind him with a feeling of relief, almost of happiness. He felt totally calm, pleased to have made his way past Takafumi without arousing his friend's suspicions. He'd worried, but there'd been no need. It had been easy, almost criminally so. 

He turned the bath taps on. Sitting on the floor of the bathroom, his back resting against the edge of the bath, he fished Keisuke's craft knife out of his trouser pocket, murmuring an apology to its owner before reaching up and placing it on the side. He was sorry, but he couldn't not do this… he'd made up his mind already. He'd left a note in the bedroom Takafumi had let him use. He couldn't remember what it was he'd written any more, even though he'd spent three hours on it, had drafted it over and over again. Thanks for everything and sorry seemed pretty likely. The way Katsumi saw it he was a liability to his friends. 

It's funny what you think of in times like this. Katsumi remembered that was his nineteenth birthday in two days. He didn't want it. Wouldn't see it. Good. 

Turning the taps off, Katsumi got undressed, folding his clothes - he didn't want to make any more of a mess than he had to - got into the bath and picked up the knife, hesitating only momentarily. It hurt, but he'd been in worse pain. The scars Koji had left were still prominent; he'd carry them for the rest of his life. 

"Not," he said quietly, "that that's going to be long." After a few seconds he realised he was crying. 

The second cut wasn't as deep. Hands slippery, he'd fumbled the knife and dropped it over the side, then looked at his blood-slicked hands, the scarlet trails running down his arms. He let them fall to his sides, watching incuriously as his blood mixed with the water. Lazy red spirals. He thought it looked almost pretty. He felt totally detached from what was happening. The pain he could cope with and it seemed more as if he was watching someone else than doing it himself. Blood is thicker than water… 

Jesus. Madoka. He'd forgotten. What would she say? He doubted she'd understand why, that he'd just had to, that things couldn't just carry on as they were. He couldn't cope with the memories, the guilt. All the maybes. All he could think of when he was trying to sleep, to think of nothing, to just relax. Things he should have done, things he shouldn't have done… like a list. He'd written them out earlier that afternoon, all the things he'd done wrong. It was his fault; everything that had happened was his fault... 

He'd had a lot of ifs and no answer to any of them. If I'd just thought, it all came down to that, all the others... that and if I'd never spoken to Koji in the first place. An attempt at atonement? Katsumi didn't know. All he knew was that he didn't want to make any more mistakes and considering his past record, he couldn't think of any other way to make sure… 

He smiled sadly. Madoka. She'd understand some day even if she wouldn't tomorrow. Well, little sister, I wish you better luck than I've had. Whatever happened to him, Katsumi hoped she'd be happy. She deserved it. 

Katsumi closed his eyes. 

*** 

Takafumi had shouted Katsumi's name and he'd opened his eyes a fraction, closing them again almost immediately as if it were too much effort to keep them open, but it was proof of life. Cursing under his breath, Takafumi fought to get him out of the bath. Katsumi wasn't heavy, he was, if anything, far too light for someone of his age and height and hadn't been eating properly for a while and had never regained the weight he'd lost in hospital, but he was a dead weight in Takafumi's arms. After a struggle, he managed to get him out and onto the floor, wrapping a towel round him. God, what a mess. Now what? 

After quickly dressing Katsumi's still bleeding wrists with a length of bandage he'd found after a frantic hunt in his medicine cabinet, he ran to the living room and dialled 110 for an ambulance, desperately fighting down his feelings of panic. Imagine you've graduated, Takafumi thought to himself. Doctors don't panic. Pretend you don't know him; he's a patient, not a friend. He wished Keisuke were here. He couldn't escape the feeling that this wouldn't have happened if Keisuke had been here, irrational though it was. 

Why hadn't he noticed how depressed the boy must have been? What kind of state of mind must Katsumi have been in that the only way out had been suicide? Slitting his wrists in the bath? Not even nineteen years old yet and all he'd wanted from life was to end it… 

Takafumi just hadn't seen Katsumi as the suicidal type. Wrong, wrong, completely wrong. 

Part 9 


	9. Chapter 9

**Killing Time, Part 9**

Where exactly he had picked up the nickname 'The Great Detective' from Kyoichiro didn't know but he knew it was meant as ironic. It made him sound like something from a pulp TV series. Kyoichiro Tachibana, the Great Detective! Only on TV Tokyo! Schedules, Saturday, 2 October: 21:00 - 22:00 Kyoichiro Tachibana the Great Detective solves another thrilling case… 

'Solves'. If only. 

Well, whatever. It wasn't all that important. All that mattered at the moment was that he was stuck with this case, and it was proving to be - in the vernacular - a pain in the ass. He didn't even know why it had fallen to him and as for his ability to solve it… 

The press coverage wasn't helping. After all, it was unusual, to say the least, for two bodies to show up in a shallow grave on a construction site. But what it meant in real terms for him was the hacks sat in their offices and tapped at their keyboards and demanded results, answers, arrests - and he couldn't find any. The coverage had been highly emotive. Some of the reports had said the bodies had been 'grossly mutilated'. Kyoichiro knew exactly what that meant and rather wished he didn't; they were dealing with some seriously fucked-up individual here, either some loser who'd recreated a movie killing or a sicko who was doing it all for 'fun'. 

It was a tenuous connection, but even so Kyoichiro couldn't help but think of the nut who'd been going round carving up students - however the victims had lived and when questioned they'd claimed they couldn't recall what the guy who'd attacked them had looked like, let alone what his name was. There was no doubt in Kyoichiro's mind that it was the same man in both cases, though: there were too many similarities for it to be otherwise. Both boys had been in the same bar the night they went missing; both had been gone for no more than a few hours; their injuries had been very similar, inflicted with the same type of knife. There'd been a sex angle too, come to think of it - both those kids had been raped. The papers hadn't made enough of either case (coverage had been scant, perhaps because the victims had lived and as such were guaranteed the anonymity of survivors), coyly hinting at what had occurred rather than being direct, for it to be likely the second boy was the victim of a copycat. 

Rape had not been part of what had happened to Ijima or Hisaya, strangely. Ijima was - had been - a pretty girl, he almost would have expected it in such a case (he would have been more surprised to hear Hisaya had been raped though if it was the same guy who'd attacked the students he probably would have been, Kyoichiro supposed). But seemingly it'd just been killing for kicks… there really wasn't much of a connection between this pair's murder and the assaults on those two boys, when you thought about it, the only thing there was the same bar had been implicated in all three cases, but it wasn't enough of a link. Besides, whoever it was who'd assaulted them seemed to have gone underground, at least for the duration. It was still way too early to tell if anything of the sort had happened with the murder, though Kyoichiro dearly hoped it had. He didn't even want to think of what would happen if this guy reoffended. 

Guys like that tend to get more, not less, brutal. 

*** 

"I'm still alive." Katsumi said: a statement of fact but delivered in a tone of mild incredulity. He looked down at his hands, palms up, fingers slightly curled. It was mildly discomfiting. There was no way of hiding what it was he'd tried to do. The bandages stopped about three-quarters of the way down his lower arms and for some reason ran across his palms. Just looking at his wrists would be enough to tell you he'd tried to kill himself. 

Third chance. He'd nearly died twice now, once by someone else's hand, once by his own. 

Jesus, Takafumi Yoshiya had seen him naked. Talk about embarrassing. Then again, Takafumi Yoshiya had saved his life. If his friend hadn't been so paranoid - justifiably paranoid, Katsumi corrected himself, after all Takafumi had found him half-conscious in the bath - he knew he'd have been dead by now. It was an embarrassment to him. He had tried to kill himself, though it wouldn't have solved anything… Hisaya would still have been dead. 

It hadn't been until the following night, unable to sleep, lying in bed in hospital and staring at the ceiling, that he'd started to wonder if maybe he was better off living. He felt dazed and quietly ashamed by the whole thing, by taking the easy way out; suicide wasn't honourable to his mind. Far better would have been to stay and fight - he hadn't after all, irredeemably disgraced himself no matter what his father had to say on the matter. It had only been later when he'd seen it in those terms. If he killed himself then Koji would have won. He'd have got away with it. Besides, his father would probably have been quietly glad to hear about it. Katsumi hated his father almost as much as he hated Koji right now. He'd keep on living and to hell with the man. 

You may as well live. At least alive he had a chance to make up for all the things he'd done wrong. He'd said as much to the psychiatrist who'd spoken to him (not, oddly enough, the one who'd tried to get him to talk after the whole thing with Koji - this had been an older man, pushing fifty if Katsumi had to hazard a guess, whilst the first man had been young, late twenties or early thirties and definitely nervy and probably more in need of analysis than half his patients were) and he had seemed honestly relieved. 

"I'm sorry," Katsumi said. Takafumi smiled at him, his confusion still obvious. "Why'd you do it?" he asked, oblivious to Keisuke's embarrassment. "Takafumi don't say that he'll tell you if he wants to don't be so direct…" Keisuke whispered to him, blushing furiously. There was a time and a place for that sort of question. "It's not a problem, Keisuke." Katsumi replied, gazing intently at the wall. "I don't know. I don't want to die any more. I don't know why I did it." 

Takafumi had been about to protest but closed his mouth when he caught sight of Katsumi's face. He wasn't just saying it, he genuinely didn't know. Looking away, he placed one hand in his pocket, touching the small square of folded paper he carried there. Katsumi's suicide note. He'd wanted to scream at the boy, throw the note at him, ask him what the hell he thought he'd been trying to do… He knew Katsumi hadn't set out to hurt him, but… reading it had made Takafumi feel terrible. And he'd called himself Katsumi's friend. Why hadn't he noticed how down he'd been feeling? Not just over Hisaya but over everything? 

Takafumi, I'm sorry, but it's better this way. It's not your fault. I don't want you and Keisuke to get into trouble because of me. Take care of Madoka. Thanks for everything. You're a good friend. Katsumi. 

Katsumi probably couldn't even remember writing it. Takafumi had been wondering why he had done it for days. But if he didn't know himself… 

At least it had been possible to save him. Takafumi knew that in a lot of cases when people slit their wrists, they don't cut deep enough. That hadn't been the way with Katsumi. He'd known what he was doing. Takafumi remembered one of the doctors - or was it one of the paramedics? - telling him thank the Gods you found him when you did. At least they'd been able to save him. There were other ways to play it. Takafumi, I'm going for a walk. He wouldn't have thought that at all odd. It would have been so easy to do it some other way. 

He'd heard of so many cases. The high-school misfit hanging herself in her bedroom whilst her parents were out shopping, the spurned lover jumping from the roof of a high-rise, the salaryman made redundant in the recession gassing himself in his car. One of his sister's closest friends had swallowed sleeping pills when she failed her entrance exams (she had lived). A man his father had worked alongside for years had thrown himself in front of a train one evening in the middle of the rush hour. And now Katsumi had tried to slit his wrists in the bath. 

"I was nineteen yesterday." Katsumi said, as if it was a source of some amazement. 

*** 

It was a cold day when Koji met Katsumi's fried Takafumi. Media attention over Eri and Hisaya was dying down and Koji felt a different approach was needed. He knew all about MO. If he and Izumi constantly picked people up in that dive of a bar they'd get caught in no time. Vary it. And although he'd thought Eri and Hisaya were fun, there'd been no sex appeal in the couple. He hadn't found Eri at all sexy (women were beginning to bore him - in terms of homicide men were more exciting) and Hisaya had not been his type. 

Takafumi, however, was. Despite his looks, Koji had to guess that he was a bit older than the others had been. Maybe it was the glasses that had him thinking that; maybe it was his attitude. Again, part of him reminded Koji of Katsumi, but he seemed more like Katsumi as he would be in a few years' time. He was more cute than attractive and, despite appearing to be fairly spirited, certainly didn't look like the kind of person who went in mildly disreputable bars. In short, Koji should never have even seen him let alone have got talking to him. 

He'd seen him in a coffee shop at about ten to two on a Saturday afternoon. He seemed pretty bored, sitting alone at a formica-topped table and listlessly stirring a cup of tea out of force of habit, staring into the cup as if he expected to see something amazing in there. It would have been bad form to go and sit next to him when the place was half-empty, so instead Koji, after ordering a coffee that he didn't intend to drink, sat at a table nearby and wondered how best to approach him. You couldn't use the 'can I buy you a drink' line in a coffee shop. You're not in a bar now, he reminded himself. 

Takafumi looked at his watch again, a small frown creasing his forehead. He was early; he wondered how long he'd have to wait for the others. They'd said 'meet up at two' and Keisuke was normally very punctual. On the other hand, he was with Katsumi - who was, after all, habitually late for almost everything. Katsumi could, if he made an effort, turn up on time to his lectures and tutorials and manage to hand essays in on time, but when it came to any other kind of deadline or indeed meeting times, he was absolutely hopeless. Madoka, Katsumi's sister, had once told him that in her first few weeks at high school, Katsumi had walked back home with her. She'd once had to wait for over an hour for him to show up and when he had he hadn't even seemed to realise that she'd been waiting for him. 

I believe the technical term for it is 'airhead', Takafumi had said to her at the time. 

Of course, his failure to show up to anywhere on time had major disadvantages, not only for the poor person waiting for him. On the one occasion he'd desperately needed people to wonder about where he was, everyone had assumed he was just being himself and had 'forgotten' what time it was he had said he'd be coming home. He hadn't gotten any better at showing up on time, though. 

"Waiting for someone?" Koji asked, gratified when his target looked up in mild surprise - surprise which did not abate when he saw who was addressing him. "Oh… yes. For a friend." Takafumi said. Even though everyone who knew him knew about Keisuke, if a stranger asked if he was waiting for a friend when he was in fact waiting for Keisuke, he just said yes and left it at that. Far easier than say you were waiting for your partner then have to answer the awkward questions that always arose when Keisuke showed up. It shouldn't have had to be that way, but telling total strangers you were waiting for your boyfriend when you were male always caused problems. True, Katsumi had thought it was cute when he found out (which had been two days after he'd first met them both - he'd just said, 'Don't take this the wrong way, but are you guys in love?'), but Katsumi was bisexual at the very least. "Running late, is he?" Takafumi nodded, wishing he'd thought to bring one of his textbooks with him. He didn't want to talk to this man. Not now, not ever. If he'd had a book in front of him, he would at least have had a pretext by which to ignore the man. "Yeah." He tried to sound non-committal. "Do you reckon he'll be long?" Koji asked. He could tell this young man didn't want to get drawn into a conversation, but he had to keep him talking. "Well. He's with another friend of mine." Don't name names, Takafumi, he thought. "He's pretty bad at making meetings. They'll probably be here soon." For the love of the gods, you two, will you hurry up? He looked down. This stranger's eyes scared him. They were so emotionless - almost dead. He wondered what Keisuke would have said about him; probably something about 'bad vibes' and 'we should leave here now'. A good idea if ever he'd heard it. He'd finish the tea as quickly as he could and go and wait outside. 

Koji followed him there. 

"Why are you following me?" Takafumi asked, turning to face him, perturbed to say the least. "I like you." Koji said. "I'm sure your friends won't mind my being here." "I think they probably will." Takafumi replied. Koji smiled at him, barely noticing Takafumi's look of quiet alarm. "If that's the case, why don't we meet up later? I know this great bar we could go to." It had to be said. "I'm sorry, but I… I already have a partner." Takafumi wished he'd said he was engaged. It would have been simpler. Why hadn't he said, 'sorry, I'm meeting my fiancée?' "I'm sure he won't mind." 

'He'? Do I have it written on my forehead or something? Takafumi wondered, aware that he was blushing. 

"Sorry, but no." Takafumi said. He hoped it was firmly. "I'm busy." Koji, aware that this conversation was getting him nowhere fast and that he'd never manage to get this man to come back home with him in the conventional way, grabbed Takafumi tightly by the wrist; pressing so hard it was painful. "Did I ever give you the choice?" he murmured. "You're coming back with me. Act casual." 

Takafumi looked at him and suddenly realised something he knew he'd never be able to prove. This man… he's the one who raped Katsumi. He knew it and at the same time he didn't know how he knew it. Keisuke would have been able to explain it all. Keisuke would have been able to help. But Keisuke wasn't here. 

*** 

"Izumi?" 

Izumi knew who it was on the other end of the phone the instant he picked it up. Before the man began to speak, even. Who else would call him here? Izumi sighed, aggrieved. It wasn't too much to ask, was it, to be allowed to spend an afternoon with his brother and sister (who, God knew, he saw rarely enough as it was) without Koji calling him up on the phone, was it? He didn't even know why he'd given Koji this number. Emergencies only, he'd said, but Koji regarded feeling horny as a life-threatening situation. More than once he had answered the phone only to hear Koji try to initiate phone sex with him. It wouldn't have been so embarrassing but for the fact that he'd told his little brother that he and Koji were just flatmates. 

"What is it, Koji? I'm about to have lunch." 

Whilst waiting for Koji to respond, he watched his sister Serika, who ironically enough attended the same school as Madoka Shibuya, fussing with the cutlery. She had heard about Hisaya and Eri through the papers and had asked him about them. She knew he went to that bar, had he seen them? Izumi didn't like having to lie to his little sister, but what else had there been to do? 

"I've got a guest with me." Koji said cryptically. Izumi frowned. "What kind of guest?" "Oh, don't worry. He won't be around long." Izumi could almost hear him smiling. "Oh, right. That kind of guest. Koji, is that such a great idea?" Koji hesitated for a while before replying. "It's been a while. I'm sure there won't be any problem." "Well, if you're quite sure." Izumi said, and had been about to hang up before a thought struck him. "What did you intend on doing with him?" "I thought I'd deal with him by myself." 

Izumi hesitated. He didn't know if that was such a great idea. The first times they'd done this, when Koji had worked alone and he'd just watched, he hadn't been able to go through with it. Izumi had the feeling that if Koji worked alone again today, it'd be the same old story. He'd sleep with whoever the poor soul he'd dragged back with him turned out to be, then cut him a couple of times then get cold feet. 

"No." he said. "Don't. Wait till I get back." "Really?" Koji sounded surprised. He probably was surprised. He probably thought that he made the running in all this. Well, let him think that. If it keeps him happy. "Why?" "I'd like to meet him." Izumi said cryptically, then lowered his voice. "Keep him occupied until I get back, but don't get carried away. I'll be back home in a few hours, amuse yourself till then. Bye." 

Koji said an abstracted "bye" as the line went dead. So… do what you like as long as you don't hurt him too badly. As long as this man (Takafumi something - he'd heard the name before, where? He was sure it would come back to him, so what the hell) was still conscious when Izumi got back, so long as he kept him alive, he could do what he would. 

Amuse yourself till then, Izumi had said. He certainly would. 

Part 10 


	10. Chapter 10

**Killing Time, Part 10**

"What are you going to do?" Keisuke asked. 

Sat in the passenger seat of Katsumi's car, he watched his friend anxiously. Katsumi had been in a state of angry tension ever since they'd seen Koji at that coffee shop, and with good reason. They both knew Takafumi well enough to know what he would and wouldn't do, and voluntarily going anywhere with a man like Koji Nanjo was not one of the things that he would have done. Takafumi wasn't like that. He didn't do that kind of thing. It was dangerous. 

"What am I going to do?" Katsumi echoed, never once taking his eyes off the road. "What do you think I'm going to do? Go home?" 

Despite appearances to the contrary, Katsumi had a good memory - both a blessing and a curse to him. He hated being able to remember exactly what Koji and his lover had done to him. Yet one of the other things he'd found he could remember was the way to Koji's flat, even if in order to get there he'd had to drive to that ridiculous bar he hated so much and make his way to it that way. Whatever. He knew it was a roundabout way to get there, but he couldn't think of any other way to do it. 

"They could kill him, Keisuke," he said obliquely. "It's what they do. Rape and murder." "Then why don't we leave it to the police?" Keisuke asked. "Can't leave it to the police. What could they do? They can't enter anyone's house without a search warrant, remember? And by that point he'd probably be dead. They work fast and the police don't. What I'm going to do, Keisuke, is to tell that bastard Koji to leave us all alone." 

Keisuke didn't reply. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened to Katsumi though he'd never told either him or Takafumi. Some things just went without saying. He'd been upset for Katsumi, but… but it had all seemed so distant. Of course it had happened, you only had to look at Katsumi to know that, but it had seemed almost unbelievable. To think of the same thing happening to Takafumi made him feel sick, but if he hadn't been with Katsumi he didn't know what he'd have done. Called the police and hoped for the best, he imagined, but would it have done any good? Katsumi didn't seem to think so. 

"Keisuke, do me a favour will you? When we get to Koji's flat, wait in the lobby. I'll go up alone. If I'm not back down in five minutes, call the police. Tell them you heard screams from the flat or something, I don't care what." He turned to face Keisuke, anxious. "You don't have to do this… I'll go up." Keisuke said rashly. Katsumi sighed. "No. Thank you, but no. You couldn't. You don't know what you're up against." 

He turned his attention back to the road again. He didn't want Keisuke to see how frightened he was. He was glad Keisuke hadn't noticed how tightly he was gripping the steering wheel. 

*** 

Koji didn't know who he had expected to be at the door and he didn't even know why he had answered it. He'd been busy. 

It was funny. Yet again, different but the same. Just like it was when they walked through the doors and didn't ever fight him off. Katsumi had screamed, once, and tried to force himself to keep calm, holding back the tears. Kimie hadn't been so restrained, crying openly and begging Koji to stop. This one, Takafumi (Koji remembered why the name sounded familiar; Katsumi had a friend called Takafumi. He wondered if this was the same one. Strange that he called them all by their first names. Well not really if you thought about it, you could hardly say he hadn't been intimate with them), had struggled, to the extent that he'd given Koji several bruises, scratch marks on his cheek and shoulders. Well, of course he had, he wasn't too confused and frightened to think straight - at least he hadn't been at first - or too drunk to resist. But in the end he'd wept too, in pain and perhaps humiliation. Koji thought he liked men better when they were crying and afraid and hated him and there was nothing they could do. 

There'd been this song in English; Koji had heard it quite by chance. A few lines went something like 'I didn't mean to hurt you but you're pretty when you cry'. Every so often he found himself being reminded of it. 

"Where's Takafumi?" 

Koji hadn't expected Katsumi Shibuya, that was for sure. Every time Koji saw him he had changed in some way. He was a chameleon. The delicate, pensive boy Koji remembered seeing the night he'd killed Hisaya seemed to have gone the same way as the vivacious teenager he'd first met. He hadn't killed him as well, had he? Koji couldn't remember ever having touched him, but murdering Hisaya had destroyed another part of Katsumi - he'd noticed the bandages Katsumi still wore round his wrists almost as soon as he'd opened the door to him. So it had been self murder this time. He didn't look cheerful or scared or wistful now. The only emotions Koji could see in the boy's eyes were anger and hostility - the look was one he'd often seen in Izumi's eyes, but had never expected to find in Katsumi. 

"What makes you think he's here at all?" Koji enquired, smiling a little. It was Katsumi's friend Takafumi, then. "Don't make me laugh." Katsumi kept his voice low. "I saw you with him. You practically dragged him off. What have you done to him?" "Nothing. He's not here. I've never met him." Katsumi didn't look away. "You're a rotten liar, Koji Nanjo. He's here." Pushing past Koji, he made his way into the flat, looking round the narrow hall, the living room. "Where's your bedroom?" Thoughtlessly, Koji grabbed the boy's shoulder. "If you're so sure I've got your friend, what makes you think I'll let either of you go?" "Don't you touch me and that's all the proof I needed." 

Katsumi pulled away from him, darting across and out of the room before Koji could react and once in the hall he yanked roughly at the nearest door handle, flinging it open and disappearing inside the room, shouting his friend's name. Koji ran after him, arriving in his bedroom bare seconds after Katsumi had slammed the door shut. He knew he should have killed this Takafumi himself instead of waiting for Izumi to come home… but Izumi had told him to wait… 

"Bastard." Katsumi said furiously. He had looked up when Koji opened the door. Sat on the floor, he had his arms round Takafumi, his expression one of revulsion and hatred. The older man was by now wearing his shirt and trousers again, clinging desperately to Katsumi and crying quietly. He hadn't tried to get away; Koji had told him to stay where he was and he had. Something about Koji commanded - what? Not respect. It had to be fear. As he watched, Katsumi looked down at his friend, his furious expression softening to one of anxious concern, saying something he couldn't hear, probably an attempt at reassurance, before turning back to him. "I should probably kill you on general principle!" "You wouldn't." Koji replied simply. "You're too scared of me. How, exactly, do you think you're going to get out of here, clever boy?" "I don't think I'm going to get out of here." Katsumi said, barely restrained anger obvious in his tone. "I know I'm going to get out of here. Keisuke knows where I am and if Takafumi and I aren't both back with him in the next five minutes he's calling the police. I think they'll find enough evidence here to convict you of rape at the very least. Kill us if you like. How far do you think you'd get before someone caught you? You wouldn't even get out of the building. Of course, if you fancied doing the police a favour you could always kill yourself." "Who's Keisuke?" "Takafumi's boyfriend. They've been going out since high school. Did you really think he wasn't going to notice? Why pick on people with families and friends? It's a recipe for disaster." Katsumi paused before speaking again. "And if you or your deranged fuck buddy so much as touch any of my friends again, I'll kill you. Get out of my life!" 

At that moment Koji didn't doubt he could have done. 

*** 

Keisuke had one hand on the cold black plastic of the payphone's receiver when Katsumi yelled his name. 

"Keisuke, for god's sake, help!" 

Katsumi stood in the doorway to the stairwell, holding one of the double doors open with one hand. He was breathless, frightened, shocked by his own audacity. How, he wondered, did I get away with this? Why am I still alive? Where exactly had he worked up the nerve to even try it? He'd been terrified all the time he'd been with Koji, all he'd wanted was to get the hell out. He didn't know how he'd managed to make it out of the flat. He'd had to resort to slapping Takafumi to snap him out of his daze (there was no way he'd have been able to carry him), then practically dragging him past Koji and out of the door, lashing out blindly at Koji in an attempt to wind him, not even caring if he'd actually hit the man or not. The blow hadn't been as hard as he'd have liked, but it had been enough to act as a distraction. He didn't know if it had been necessary but he hadn't wanted to chance it. 

When Keisuke got up close, he could see that Katsumi was pale and shivering slightly - it was cold in the hallways and he'd lost his coat, though that probably wasn't all it was. "Are you okay?" "Does it matter?" Katsumi asked. He turned away, back into the stairwell, Keisuke following after a moment, stopping short when he caught sight of Takafumi, who sat on one of the steps, leaning against the wall, eyes vacant. That was where Katsumi's coat had gone - he'd draped it over Takafumi's shoulders. "What happened to him?" he asked in a tone of mild disbelief. "Do you really need to ask?" Katsumi replied. He sounded upset and worried and quite unbelievably angry, relaxing slightly when he noticed Keisuke's expression. "Help me get him to the car. It's not safe here." 

What Koji could do here - again, they were practically in public - Katsumi didn't know, but all the same. Hadn't the man done enough already? Why tempt fate? 

*** 

Izumi was going to kill him. Absolutely kill him. 

He had just let - through stupidity and incompetence and funk - someone he plain knew he could easily dominate get the upper hand. He'd just let it happen. Why? Why had he worried about the police coming? Why had he believed Katsumi's cockamamie story about having someone waiting for him downstairs? He'd just let two people, both of whom were a good foot shorter than he was, both of whom he knew from experience were weaker than he was, walk right over him; run past him and out the door. He hadn't realised until he'd looked out of the window, in time to see Katsumi practically jumping into the front of a small red car then driving away rather too fast, (he hadn't known the boy could drive. Then again, he'd never asked him if he could) how absolutely terrified Katsumi must have been. But looking back he could see - Katsumi had been afraid, terribly so, but his anger and fears for his friend had overridden it at first. 

On all the other occasions he'd met Katsumi, he'd been the one making the running. This time it had been different. 

And Izumi was going to kill him. There was no way he could tell Izumi about Katsumi just walking in here and... No way. It just wouldn't work. What the hell was he going to do now? He couldn't just brazen his way out, couldn't just say 'oh, he ran away'. Izumi would go mad. There was only one thing he could do: he would have to go and find another person - another man, he'd told Izumi he had a man with him. The only way to stop Izumi from losing his temper completely would be to find someone he could use as a decoy… a scapegoat. The phrase bubbled up unbidden. 

He just hoped he'd be able to find someone in time. 

*** 

Katsumi sat back and ran his hands through his hair, then stifled a yawn. Normally he hated traffic jams (this one was probably because of an accident up ahead, the road had been busy but clear a few minutes ago) but he kind of welcomed this one. He wondered if he should turn the radio on then thought no, not politic, not unless one of the others asks for it on. He wondered how Takafumi could stand the silence in here. When he started thinking too hard he normally put the TV on, listened to music or read a book or something; anything as long as it blotted out his thoughts. 

He wondered what he could say. He'd heard the lot himself, the weak, pathetic phrases people trotted out at times like this. Are you okay was the stupidest of them all; of course Takafumi wouldn't be feeling okay. It had always struck him as absurd, that one. Are you okay? Of course, I wear the bandages for the fun of it, I think rape is sexy and I take all my holidays in hospital, there's nothing like it if you want to relax. What do you think? Is there anything I can do to help was just plain infuriating. Katsumi had found that it had only reinforced his own feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness. I understand how you're feeling? No. Wrong. And completely inaccurate. He didn't understand how Takafumi felt about all this. The way he had felt could easily have been completely different from the way Takafumi was feeling now. There was no prescribed way for dealing with a rape. Or not dealing with it. Katsumi hadn't dealt with it himself - he'd just tried to forget that it happened. He knew it wasn't healthy but he had enough to worry about as it was. 

Anyway, Takafumi would talk if he wanted to. If he wanted to be quiet or fall asleep or just sit with his head on Keisuke's shoulder and stare out of the window and see absolutely nothing, it was his affair. 

How do I feel now? Katsumi wondered, idly flicking the dangling key rings attached to his car keys. As well as the usual leather promotional thing from the garage ('thank you for spending a small fortune on a Toyota as opposed to any other practically identical make of cute little car', or words to that effect), he had somehow acquired a plastic Sailor Mars and it was this that he was fiddling with whilst waiting for the traffic to start moving again. He really wasn't sure how he felt. He was still angry, of course, and still rather scared, but he'd been angry and scared for months. He was even almost getting used to feeling generally depressed and not being able to satisfactorily explain why he was unhappy. What he wasn't accustomed to was confusion. Why Takafumi? 

By the same token, why Hisaya and Eri, why Kimie Mori, why me? 

Why did Koji have to rape or kill anybody? 

*** 

If Kai had owned a cat he'd have kicked it. As he didn't and certainly wasn't going to get one just so he could use it as a football when he got angry, he settled for cursing loudly and fluently to the four walls of his apartment before leaning out of the window and hurling an empty beer can at his neighbours' cat, a large, evil-minded tom - called something almost entirely inappropriate like Cuddles or Fluffy - which had probably fathered most of the stray cats in the area. He'd hated that bastard animal ever since one of his exes, in a fit of pique, had said he had more in common with it than he'd like to think. He couldn't remember which one it was now. She'd been called something like Aya or Miya or something, he didn't care as long as Cuddles or whatever got off his bloody balcony. And Miya could go jump too. She'd been a weird girl, had Miya. She'd had a brother of about his age who she never mentioned except to say the family was better off without him. Too bad Kai knew her brother, though they'd never been more than friendly. Best not to mention it to Miya. 

He was angry. Where did that get him? Nowhere, really, but he didn't care about that either. 

Kai blamed the whole thing firmly on Kimie Mori. It hadn't been easy to talk to the kid before, but now it was even harder. Now he'd finally gotten out of hospital he didn't go out much, certainly didn't go in bars, and if he hadn't realised he was being flirted with before he certainly hadn't minded it. Now he refused to countenance any kind of flirtation; he had slapped Kai when he'd touched his shoulder and practically screamed 'get off me!' at him. Kai wasn't easily embarrassed but he'd found himself thinking - for the first time in a long while - everyone's staring at me, and wishing it wasn't the case. 

Bloody kid. 

Or that was what he'd thought at the time. Looking out of the window again at the depressing view of a side street that his flat commanded, on yet another wet, miserable afternoon (the weather at this time of year was the pits), he didn't really know if that was what he thought any more. 

He supposed it wasn't really Kimie's fault. Of course not. It had been stupid of him to choose to go home with whoever it was he'd gone home with (if he'd even chosen to - Kai hadn't thought of that before) but Kai had a horrible feeling if he'd been in the same position he'd have done exactly the same thing. He was widely considered to be the type of man who threw caution to the wind incredibly quickly and it was a fair summation of his character. If an attractive stranger had invited him back to their flat he'd probably have taken them up on it and he probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. But he could look after himself. If anyone had tried to kill him he'd have broken their jaw for starters, knife or no knife. 

There had to be some way to find out who'd done this. There just had to be. Whatever asshole had done this would have to pay for it. You didn't go around raping and stabbing people for 'fun'. You just didn't do it. You certainly couldn't expect to do it and get away with it. And whoever had done this wouldn't. He'd make sure of that much. And he could only think of one way to do it. So he'd promised himself he wouldn't have anything to do with all this, with this way of behaving, with this life any more - but who else would be able to carry out something like this? How else would he get away with something like this, this thing he wanted to do? 

After picking the phone up off the table, Kai collapsed unceremoniously onto the couch, dropping the phone on one of the cushions nearby before opening the address book another of his girlfriends had brought him so that he couldn't use the 'I lost your number' excuse on her any more (he'd torn the page with her name and address on it out when he dumped her. Occasionally he'd wish he hadn't), flicking through it. He found the business card - now rather dog-eared, the once-white card discoloured - about halfway through the book. It looked innocuous enough, but appearances… 

He hesitated only momentarily before he dialled the number on it. 

Part 11 


	11. Chapter 11

**Killing Time, Part 11**

Katsumi stood by the window with his hands pressed to the glass and stared at the rain which turned the world outside into an Impressionist painting. He was intruding just by being here. This wasn't anything to do with him and he'd known it from the start. As soon as it was polite to do so, he'd retreated to his room, or rather Takafumi's spare room which currently had most of his stuff in it, claiming a headache. The last thing Takafumi and Keisuke needed at the moment was a third party who did nothing but get in the way. This wasn't his problem any more. He had his own problems to deal with and he had no right to try to deal with this one as well until he'd sorted out some of his own. 

Unless they actually wanted him at the moment, he'd stay out of the way. 

He didn't want to think about what would have happened if Keisuke and he hadn't arrived at that café when they did. They should have been there earlier, they could have prevented this… but if they'd arrived later, what would have happened? Katsumi knew from experience what was likely to have happened. At least they'd been able to do something. At least they hadn't been too late to help. 

He doubted he'd sleep well tonight. He doubted the others would either. 

He didn't want to be here. Not now. Putting his coat on and picking up the umbrella he'd bought just under a week ago when it became apparent that the bad weather was only going to get worse, Katsumi walked out of the room and the flat, closing the front door carefully and quietly behind him. He didn't know where he was going and didn't care that he didn't know, but he had to get out. He was interfering at a time when Takafumi and Keisuke should have been left alone. 

In the kitchen, Keisuke frowned to himself and looked at the floor. He didn't know what to do, what to say. And to think today had begin so simply. He wasn't even sure why it was they'd agreed to go out - to break the monotony of what had promised to be such a dull day. It had been Takafumi's idea and he'd laughed at the stupidity of it, of going out for the sake of it and just seeing what happened. And even when they'd gone out… 

Katsumi had met his sister and they'd talked for a bit about school and parents, mind-numbing family stuff. He'd smiled a bit and it was rare to see Katsumi smile these days. Takafumi had then said something about wanting to go and see if a book he'd ordered had arrived or not though Keisuke suspected that was a cover for wanting to go shopping. Katsumi, nonetheless, had grabbed him by the arm and asked him to save him from the tyranny of medical textbooks and Takafumi had laughed again and said something about being careful and if you don't stop flirting so obviously with Kei, Katsumi, I'll really have to get you, then he'd walked off. 

Takafumi hadn't said a word to either of them since, and Keisuke hadn't felt able to ask Katsumi what exactly had happened when he had been in Koji's flat earlier that afternoon. It probably hadn't been much but for Katsumi, knowing what he knew about Koji, it had doubtless been enough that he could fill in the blanks as to what had happened and what Koji and his boyfriend (Katsumi had told them very little about the man save for the fact that he was a jealous, sadistic lunatic) had intended to happen. 

What was it Katsumi had said to him after they'd seen Koji at that coffee shop? Something like that Koji, along with that boyfriend of his, were the only people in the world that he could quite cheerfully murder. 

Keisuke knew the feeling. He wasn't a violent person by nature but already he knew the feeling and it frightened him. 

In an attempt to keep himself busy and stop himself from thinking along those lines, Keisuke decided to start making a dinner which he didn't think anyone would be in the mood to eat. At least the option would be there, he thought. Displacement activity - it would keep him busy at least. He didn't think he could stand to do nothing but think and blame himself for not having thought a bit earlier. Katsumi could have told him it was futile to think like that, though it was hardly as if Katsumi didn't think like that himself. 

Sat on the floor of the bathroom dressed in a bathrobe, Takafumi looked round the room through a curtain of wet hair without seeing anything. He felt like he should say something to the others but wasn't sure what. He didn't know how to react to what had just happened. 

So he didn't react at all. 

*** 

Kimie Mori, currently lying on his front on his bed with a book that he wasn't even looking at let alone reading, wearing a walkman that he hadn't even bothered turning on, listened to his parents arguing again and wondered if things might have been easier had he been born into a different family, preferably one who didn't live in a cramped high-rise with paper-thin walls. If he could hear his parents then the neighbours could. Their neighbours, not that they were really on speaking terms, had to be getting well and truly fed up of living next door to them - they'd be round to bitch tomorrow, no doubt, about the baby needing it's sleep. Big deal. Kimie needed sleep as well but he didn't complain when the baby went off at half past two in the morning for the Xth night in a row. 

But Kimie was getting well and truly fed up of listening to his parents' 'disagreements', that was for sure. He wished they'd stop arguing. More to the point, he wished they'd stop arguing about him. 

Kimie didn't know what had sparked off this argument - it wasn't like they'd have told him if he'd asked anyway. It had been fairly obvious before. At least twice a week he had been chided for his behaviour, for not being serious enough about school, for being irresponsible and reckless. That had at least made some sense and had at least involved him. Now when they argued about him or the way he was behaving they didn't tell him as much. They just argued with each other and if he asked what the problem was he was told quite brusquely that it had nothing to do with him, when that was clearly not the case. They had to think he was stupid. He supposed it was easier to think of him that way than to see him as someone who did dumb things. Maybe it was his medical bills this time - he knew his family were not rich, he also knew he'd cost them a lot in the last few months. 

Still, the irony of his situation wasn't lost on him. They'd fretted because he'd wanted to go out and now they fretted because he wanted to stay in his room and practically had to be forced to go out, even if it was only to go to school. 

He hated school. It wasn't like he'd ever really enjoyed it, but he hated it now. He certainly wasn't learning anything there, with the possible exception of how to hide his feelings. Most of the people in his form thought he'd somehow 'asked for it'. They hadn't told him as much but it had been pretty obvious. No matter what people said he wasn't stupid. A couple of the girls still talked to him, but that was because they found him 'interesting'. Like a zoo animal, or the subject of a Sociology project. The boys ignored him - mainly. It was the ones who didn't he had to look out for. He'd never had many friends but he had none now. Kimie wondered what the problem with him was, if they thought that what had happened to him was contagious. That was a more than averagely stupid idea, but… 

Actually part of him did want to go out, but at the same time he didn't. Not that it made any sense to him, that kind of feeling. It was getting dark outside, and he hated being out alone after dark. He hated being alone anyway. At least if his parents were arguing he knew that they were still there. He hadn't been scared of shadows or the night for a long time, he knew there were no such things as monsters in the cupboards or under the beds. It was the people who came out at night that worried him now. 

The people… they'd told him something, that couple - he couldn't remember their names, couldn't remember if they had ever let him know them - they'd mentioned someone else to him. It was one of the few things he remembered of the evening with any lucidity. The taller man, the one with long hair, had said something along the lines of you're just like this other boy, you're pretty when you cry. Kimie was sure he'd know the name if he heard it again. 

Turning the Walkman on, he tried to blot out the noise of his mother's raised voice and concentrate on the play of raindrops on the windowpane. It was always the way… his mother's voice would get louder and shriller and more hysterical and his father would try to keep his level and calm. It was always the way they played it. Maybe they enjoyed it. It was a relationship of a sort… 

"Shut up." Kimie said to himself, feeling the horribly familiar hot prickling behind the eyes that meant he was on the verge of tears yet again. He was so emotional these days… he'd never been seen as undemonstrative but now practically anything could upset him, or so it seemed. "For the love of the Gods shut the hell up." 

Kurosaki. He'd said he'd help him. How? In what capacity? You can't help the helpless. 

*** 

The man searching desperately through his pockets for what, Koji didn't know, was in his mid forties at the least. He wasn't that attractive - certainly wasn't cute. There had to be some reason behind him noticing him in the first place. Looking back knowing what he came to know later he wondered if it had been because something about him looked familiar. Maybe it was. Who could tell? 

"What's the matter?" "I can't find my wallet." "Do you think it's been stolen?" "Very probably." "Well, do you need any help?" 

The man was a stranger but there was something familiar about him. What was it? There was nothing about him of any note, he just looked like any one of the city-ciphers you saw day in, day out. So unremarkable he almost became remarkable. It had been so easy to get him talking. After Takafumi's recalcitrance it had almost been pleasant. 

"I only wish my son could behave as well…" "What about your son?" "He's got no decency. Not only that, he's got no sense." "Oh?" 

The man's name was Shibuya - he was estranged from his son, a nineteen year old student who dyed his hair blonde. He felt it was the boy's fault that someone he'd met in a bar a while back had tried to kill him. He didn't understand how his son could claim that he'd done nothing to provoke it. These things don't happen for no reason at all. He felt that anyone with a grain of common sense would have been able to spot a dangerous situation when they saw it, would be able to spot a killer when they met them, and would behave accordingly. That his son's failure to realise what was going to happen to him was entirely his fault; he was naïve - no, he was stupid. He must have seen it coming, he must have. How can you fail to spot the killer in your midst? 

Koji wanted to prove him wrong. 

*** 

Father! 

Like a primal scream. Wasn't that some kind of therapy? Wasn't it meant to be therapeutic to scream? Was that him screaming? If it was he wasn't feeling any better but he didn't care because what did it matter how he felt? Maybe he'd once known about whether or not screaming was therapeutic but he'd forgotten it. His father might have known but of course he couldn't ask his father could he? Because all that was over now, over and gone, and there was no way to get it back and he had no way to atone for it and no way to apologise and say he hadn't meant it… 

He couldn't take back any of the things he'd said, any of the things he'd later regretted saying and there'd been plenty, god damn his stupid stubborn bloody pride, look where it had got them all, he hadn't been willing to admit he was wrong and now look at the mess he'd gone and made, look at what he'd done to his life and to his family and the people he said were his friends and look what he'd done to his father. Stupid just to assume he'd always be there and that he could go and apologise any time… 

Father! 

He'd never screamed like this in public before. Never, ever. It wasn't something he'd ever felt the need to do. He'd never cried openly in public either, he'd normally been able to hold back until he was alone or practically alone and it was appropriate for him to cry. Once upon a time he'd had something called self-control but then again once upon a time he'd had a sense of self… he barely even felt it when somebody slapped him. 

Calm down. You're making a scene… oh, for heavens' sake, child! He's not listening to you. He's hysterical. Hysterical? I think he needs a doctor, not a slap. 

He'd never been accused of being overly inhibited but there'd been some things he wouldn't do but that was all in the past now, everything was all in the past but he couldn't leave it behind like you were supposed to with the past. The past was a burden, memory was a burden, it was all too much and he couldn't get by alone but he couldn't expect to find any sympathy or help and even if he did he couldn't accept it everyone he cared for got hurt or died and there was nowhere to go and no one to talk to, no way to let go and no way forward, it was all too much and he just wanted it all to stop. 

Full stop. 

Is that his son? I didn't recognise him. He's had a bad time. He's a bit highly-strung. A bit highly-strung? 

Murderer. Who was a murderer? He felt like a murderer, he'd killed three people because he'd been too much of a coward to go and tell the police what he knew and because of it one of his friends had been raped, someone he didn't even know had been raped and practically killed as well, his oldest friend and his girlfriend had been murdered and so had his father and it was the same man and he could have stopped it and he hadn't so wasn't it his fault since he'd had it in his power to do something and he hadn't just because he was scared? What kind of a person did that make him? He didn't deserve the second chance, the third chance, all he did with life was screw it up so why was he alive when he didn't deserve it? Why had three innocent people been killed because of him? Why was he still alive? Why couldn't he die? 

Mother, what's the matter with niichan? 

Make it stop. 

Just make it all stop. 

I don't care how you do it but make it all stop. Please! 

This must be what it felt like to be going mad. Maybe he was going mad. A part of him (the rational part?) didn't see how anyone who screamed in public, even at funerals - and wasn't it meant to be the done thing for the men at funerals to act, if not totally unemotionally, then at least to stay restrained? - had nightmares, jumped at shadows and thought obsessively about murder and self-murder and guilt could be considered anywhere near rational. Murderer. Lunatic. Now look what you've done. Who's it going to be next? Where's it going to end? 

Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Make it stop. 

Do you want to be alone for a while? He's still not listening. 

He'd felt like this before and he knew how he'd made it stop then. Then again he didn't care about the how. Call it atonement. Maybe if he finished what Koji had started Koji wouldn't feel the need to hurt anybody else any more. He could at least try. Even if he was wrong, it wouldn't matter. At least it wouldn't matter to him and that was all he wanted. 

I do apologise for the fuss; he's never done this before. Come on, Katsumi. Let's go somewhere private. 

*** 

"Oniichan." Standing in the hall after changing out of her stiff, uncomfortable formal clothes, Madoka knocked on Katsumi's bedroom door. "Do you want… I mean, I'm making myself some dinner, and I thought you might want something. You should eat something." 

She listened to the silence for a bit, then opened the door and looked round the room. Not terribly good form. Katsumi didn't like people walking in on him, but given his behaviour earlier she just wanted to check. At funerals men are meant to be stoic, but this version of her brother, who seemed like nobody she'd ever met before, screamed and cried when he wanted to and just didn't care. Then again he, this familiar stranger, a boy she knew intimately and had never met, was frightened and hurting and nobody could reach him. 

The room was a bit untidy, but it was to be expected. Pretty spartanly furnished. Most of the things Katsumi considered to be important he'd taken with him when he left home and were currently in boxes or Takafumi's guest room. Katsumi himself lay on one side on the bed, still fully dressed but apparently deeply asleep. The window was wide open, letting rain into the room. Shaking her head slightly, she walked over to the window and quietly closed it. She watched the rain cascading down the windows for a while, then turned to go when something on the floor nearby caught her attention. 

She'd seen it a couple of times previously either yesterday or the day before, she couldn't remember which. A small bottle of clear plastic with a white printed label stuck on it. She'd seen things like it many times before that. Pill bottles, the kind of thing you got prescription medicine in. She picked it up and looked at it, read the label incuriously. She'd been about to drop it to the floor again when she made the connection she should have done the minute she saw it. 

When she'd seen this bottle last it had been practically full. She remembered shaking it and listening to it rattle and Katsumi telling her to put it down because he didn't want to lose it. Madoka couldn't help but remember that was probably the most lucid and clear thing he'd actually said since he'd found out about father. 

Still not quite wanting to believe it she walked over to Katsumi and tried to rouse him. He was quite a light sleeper ordinarily and she should at least have got a response from him even if it was only some kind of muttered complaint. She should not have got the nothing that she did. Besides which, Katsumi seldom if ever slept on his side, normally preferring to lie flat. He'd seemed rather too tense to sleep when they'd got back as it was and he'd been hysterical earlier - uncle had been forced to slap him to get him to calm down. Alarmed now, she looked round the room to see if there was anything she could… 

He'd left his notebook on the desk; she hadn't noticed it when she went to close the window. One page had been torn out of it, she could see even from here there'd been something scribbled on it with a bright red felt tip pen which had probably been the closest thing to hand. A few inches away, a glass about a quarter full of tap water or something very similar. The lid to the pill bottle. If she'd looked closely she would have seen a few specks of white powder on the surface of the desk. Katsumi had opened the bottle there after writing the note, a slightly longer one than last time, then he'd taken the pills which previously he'd poured out onto the desk and had pushed around with the end of the pen whilst thinking of what he wanted to say. After that he'd walked over to his bed, dropping the bottle on his way. 

Madoka hadn't looked closely. 

"Mother!" 

Part 12 


	12. Chapter 12

**Killing Time, Part 12**

'A friend of mine's having the most horrible time, oniisan! Someone killed her father and her brother took an overdose the evening after the funeral… apparently it's the third time he's been in hospital in the last six months, and the second time he's tried to kill himself! Isn't that just awful? I don't know what to say... I feel so bad for her.' 

Serika had said it in all innocence. She hadn't meant anything by it but what she said - don't you feel sorry for Madoka too? - but if she'd been paying more attention she would have noticed the effect it had on Koji. 

Last night it had been a girl. Her name was Aya. Izumi had been playing with her. Koji, by and large, had just watched. He didn't like it much, hadn't wanted to do it. As a matter of fact he didn't like any of it much any more, he never really had in the first place and now… he hated it, he really hated it, but he didn't know how to say so. The girl had died only a couple of hours ago. He had wondered how Serika Izumi, age seventeen - Kimie's age - would have reacted to being told she was sharing a flat with a dead woman at the moment, a woman her brother had helped kill. 

"Do you know her well?" Izumi asked, a seemingly meaningless question. Serika nodded. "Yes. We're good friends… I think you've met her a couple of times…" "What's her name?" Koji broke in, ignoring Izumi's expression, a look which clearly said 'shut up'. "Madoka Shibuya, why?" Koji sighed. "I know the family. I used to be friends with her brother." Izumi kicked him under the table; he ignored it. "He was a sweet kid." Serika nodded; she understood, or seemed to. "They're a nice family. It's such a shame these things have to happen… why can't people just be nice is what I want to know… why do people have to do things like that to each other?" 

Why indeed? Koji didn't know. 

But could you really have described the Shibuyas as a nice family? Poor, crazy Katsumi qualified, so by the sounds of it did his sister, but from what Koji had seen of the father - and his acquaintance with the man had been mercifully brief - he was, to put it mildly, disagreeable. He wouldn't have believed the things that man had said if he hadn't heard them himself. No wonder Katsumi had reacted the way he had over Takafumi. No wonder he'd attempted suicide. It took a certain type of person to call a rape victim a slut. 

Then again Koji supposed it took a certain type of person to believe that you'd be doing someone a favour by killing their father. 

*** 

One of the things Takafumi liked about having a ridiculously diligent boyfriend who went to all the same classes as he did was that if he didn't want to concentrate in lectures he didn't have to. Keisuke would be writing it all down anyway. Instead he sat still, his head resting in his hands, and tried to think. 

Right, things to do at the weekend. He had to go shopping again. There was something he'd wanted to buy. First off he still had to check on that damn textbook which sure was taking its own sweet time to show up, secondly he had to get a new red t-shirt to replace the one he'd managed to comprehensively ruin by spilling coffee down it. He'd have to ask Katsumi… 

Katsumi. 

Christ. He kept forgetting about Katsumi. Funny how you take people for granted. It was probably only because the boy had been living with him for so long now that he just assumed he'd be around, but of course he wasn't. It probably didn't help that most of his junk was still in the spare room. Not that he needed that where he was - still in hospital, a danger to himself if he wasn't watched. 

I believe the technical term for it is 'insane'. 

It had been a shock to hear about his father. Takafumi had never liked the guy much but he hadn't deserved what had happened to him - hell, nobody deserved that. Except perhaps Koji. Great, there was another thing he hadn't wanted to think about. He hoped it was a normal and healthy reaction to want to kill someone who'd raped you. Keisuke, damn that annoying, persuasive, ludicrously cute little bastard, had absolutely insisted that they 'talk about it'. He'd probably read somewhere that it was an effective way of dealing with trauma. He'd wanted him to go and see a student counsellor as well but Takafumi had said an emphatic no way. If he was going to 'talk about it' with anyone it would be with someone who actually had a right to know how he felt. 

On the subject of feelings, apparently Katsumi wasn't talking. To anybody. Either he didn't want to or he didn't feel able to or he just couldn't find the words for how he was feeling. Maybe there weren't any words for how he was feeling. Maybe there just weren't any words. He'd practically had a complete mental breakdown at the funeral; two and a half weeks ago now. Apparently he hadn't said a word since he was admitted to hospital. Once upon a time Katsumi had been the most talkative person Takafumi knew. The saddest thing was that it wasn't even that surprising. 

None of it was surprising, really. Poor kid. Katsumi hadn't deserved it. None of them had. 

"Takafumi? Is something wrong?" "No… no, nothing's wrong." 

Keisuke merely raised an eyebrow and turned back to his notes. He could tell when Takafumi was lying, but he could also tell when not to force the issue. 

*** 

"Kai?" 

Kimie was just thankful his parents had gone out somewhere - he didn't know where. As usual they'd asked him if he wanted to come, as usual he'd said no and as usual they hadn't forced the issue. But they wouldn't have understood this at all. As far as they knew he didn't have friends that looked like this. He'd once had a few at school. Once. And nobody he'd met casually whilst out of an evening had been the kind of person he'd give his address to. 

So how, he wondered, did Kai Kurosaki know it? 

"I thought you worked Saturdays." Kimie said lamely. "Well I don't." Kai replied. He did; according to his boss he was suffering from food poisoning. "Are you going to ask me in or are you going to let me take you out?" Kai, for all his qualities, was not a patient man. It was a minor miracle that he'd waited as long as he had to show up at the door of the boy's house. "Um, you'd probably better come in for now… It's okay, my parents have gone out." Kimie laughed anxiously before standing aside to let Kai in. "Only we'd better keep it down because the neighbours have got a baby and they get cross if someone wakes it up and my parents always do when they fight… so they're not that crazy about us at the moment… actually, maybe I better had go out." 

He's nervous as hell, Kai thought. Not a good start. Still, he had to remember what kind of person it was he was dealing with. Last time this boy had gone out properly - which, admittedly, was months ago - someone had tried to kill him. It's no real wonder that he's nervous. 

He could hear Kimie closing a cupboard drawer in the living room and walked into the doorway to see what he was doing. Whatever it was, he stopped and looked up at Kai when he heard his footsteps, and smiled at him, albeit as edgily as he had laughed. 

"What should I put?" Kai shrugged. "Just say you're going out and that you'll call if anything happens." 

Kimie knew from experience that his parents didn't like getting notes like that but, he supposed, this time they might not mind that much. They might even be relieved that he was acting a little more like himself as opposed to spending all his free time in his room. 

In the end he wrote that he was going to see a friend. His parents hadn't noticed that he didn't have any proper friends at the moment. 

*** 

The view from the living room window was being treated with far more reverence than it actually merited. Kimie, leaning on the back of one of Kai's chairs, was gazing intently out at the rainy streets, occasionally giggling slightly. He liked to watch the rain falling, especially at night, when the raindrops falling past the streetlamps were illuminated, looking like little shooting stars. It was pretty. The night was pretty. But it was nicer not to have to be out in it, especially not whilst it was raining this heavily. It rained so much at the moment… 

"Kai," Kimie said, looking at the older man over one shoulder, "that's got to be the ugliest looking cat I have ever seen in my whole entire life." He spoke in a totally deadpan manner, only starting to giggle when he reached the end of the sentence. Looking up, Kai had to stifle a giggle himself when he saw what it was Kimie meant by the ugliest cat he'd ever seen. That wretched Cuddles was on his balcony again, yowling malcontentedly. The animal seemed about half the size it normally did, it was that wet. "That is because you are looking at an absolutely hideous cat." "'s got to be the most revolting cat in the world." Kimie agreed. "That cat should not be allowed out in public without a bag over its head." 

Kai had already known that Kimie couldn't handle his drink very well. But it had been the only way he could think of that would mean Kimie would even countenance coming back home with him. Not that he wanted to do anything untoward to him… well, not much, anyway… and the last time he'd spoken to him the boy had flipped when he touched him. Yes, that'd been the day he'd gotten in touch with Nanjo again, hadn't it? The man - well, not Nanjo himself, obviously, but someone close to him though - had told him to find out what he could but to 'take it slowly'. 

Hence Kimie Mori. 

Or, at least, that was how Kai rationalised it to himself. It wasn't just that of course. Kimie was… well, there was just something about him. He was interested in him as more than just a means to an end. He was an interesting kid, but Kai couldn't have said why he thought that. Then again, Kai was drunk too. 

Sighing, he slumped further down into the sofa cushions and wondered what to do now. Normally he'd have made a move on whoever it was he'd brought back to his flat a long time ago. He normally had one aim in mind when he brought people back to his flat. 

"You bored?" Kimie asked, sitting down heavily next to him, having tired of staring at the rain and his hideous cat. Kai looked up at him in mild surprise. "…not really," he said. "Well, I am. There's gotta be somethin' we can do. I'm really, really, bored." He grabbed Kai's phone off the table. "I should call my mum, she probably thinks I'm dead in a ditch somewhere…" He stabbed several times at the keypad then held the phone to his ear and let it ring for a short while before definitely pressing at the 'end call' key and dropping the phone on the floor. "Nothing, they're prob'ly still out… hey, Kai, I'm glad I am with you, I really hate being by myself…" "You talk too much." Kai addressed the ceiling. No, he really isn't used to drinking, is he? I think I overdid it a bit… Kimie looked at him oddly for a beat, then began giggling again. "Yeah, everyone always used to say that you know… all the time… but…" He smiled, but it wasn't funny any more. Everyone always used to say that, but not now. 

Kai wasn't sure he liked the atmosphere in the room any more. The last thing he needed was for Kimie to start getting reflective. He was trying to get the kid to relax a bit so the last thing he wanted him to do was think. 

So he decided to distract him. 

*** 

"Don't… just… just don't do it any more… please." "Look, I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean… hell, kid, will you pull yourself together?" 

"I don't need this," Kai muttered under his breath. This was stupid, just stupid. Okay, he hadn't thought. Okay, maybe it had been a bit premature. But this was completely out of proportion to anything he'd done. He'd never had anyone get hysterical on him because he'd tried to make out with them. And Kimie had seemed to like it when he'd kissed him, so… where the hell had all this come from? 

For a couple of minutes he just stood there staring out of the window, covertly watching Kimie in the glass, trying to work out if he was getting any calmer. The boy seemed to be attempting to settle down again; he no longer seemed so out of control, but he still seemed wary, his posture was still defensive. It looked like it was going to be one of those nights, one of the nights he hated, one of those times where there's nothing to do but talk, even though you don't know what to say or if you want to know what it is that's going to be said. Just breaking the silence would be hard enough. 

"T… that cat's back," Kimie said finally, dropping his gaze when Kai turned back from the window to look directly at him again. "'s not yours, is it?" "No." Kai spoke quietly. "It's not my cat. Now suppose you tell me what all that…" Kimie cut him off. "Not your fault. 's got nothing to do with you, really. I like you." "Then what's the problem?" 

Kimie looked at his hands, at the scars running across his fingers and palms, and sighed deeply and audibly. Slowly, he traced his left index finger along one of the thin raised lines - Kai noticed him shiver slightly, unconsciously, before holding both hands out to him, palms upwards. 

"Do you think they're very ugly?" he asked, suddenly sounding extremely young. "What?" Kai blinked and took a couple of paces towards him, then hesitated. The last thing he wanted was for Kimie to start panicking again. "My hands." "Why? Do you?" He reached out and took one of the boy's hands in both his own. Kimie looked up at him anxiously. "There's nothing wrong with your hands." "There's no need to be nice, Kai. Look at them!" There was an accusatory note in Kimie's tone now. "They're hideous! The rest of my body's worse!" "Don't be so bloody stupid." Kai hadn't intended to speak quite so sharply but he wasn't that upset that he had. Kimie was being incredibly stupid and he had to know it. "There is nothing wrong with your body, or your hands, or any part of you. Now for Christ's sake will you stop going on about it? You sound like some self-obsessed woman fishing for compliments." 

Miya had done that. She'd gone on and on about her body. Miya had known she was attractive but she'd spoken as if she wasn't. The way she'd preened when people reassured her that she was pretty, slim, funny and all the rest of it had really gotten on Kai's nerves after a while. Still it probably wasn't fair to compare Kimie to Miya, he probably didn't mean it in quite the same way. It was probably because of what happened to him… 

Speaking of which… 

Kai went and sat down on the sofa again, attempting whilst so doing to keep a respectable distance away from Kimie. The boy had gone very quiet again - not a good sign. But it was one of those nights where all you can do is just keep talking until whatever it is that's been left unsaid is finally out in the open. 

"What's up, kid?" "Do you like me?" Kimie was looking straight at him now, his head angled slightly to the left, seemingly genuinely curious. "Of course. What kind of question is that?" Yes, definitely one of those nights. "Do you like me?" "Yeah…" He stifled a yawn. "Why d'ya ask? Or are you upset cause of what happened earlier? Don't be, 's not your fault. I like you." "So whose fault is it?" Kai asked, attempting to keep his voice neutral. "I dunno their names… but… I hate them." Kimie had his arms wrapped round his knees; another defensive posture. "Why?" Kai hadn't wanted to have to ask that but sometimes you have to ask no matter how hard it is. He didn't want to know the 'why', but he had to know. "Because…" Kimie hesitated. "Because I do… they tried to kill me, Kai, and I'd never even met them before…" Kimie was blinking back tears; aside from that his expression was as neutral as his voice. He seemed more confused than upset, for now at least. "And he didn't even like me and he… and… Kai, I'm not a virgin." 

He was crying now, quietly. The kind of thing that's painful to watch. Kai didn't really know what to say but he knew, pretty much, what to do, it had always worked for him before. Kimie didn't try to resist when Kai pulled him against his chest. Has parents hadn't understood, nor had the people at school. At least Kai didn't seem to think it was his fault. Of course none of them had actually said it but he'd known it. Why weren't you more careful? He'd had nobody to talk to, nobody… 

"Ssh. It's okay. Cry if you want to." 

When Kai was angry, normally, superficially angry, it showed. When he was enraged it didn't show at all. If anything he looked serene and in a way he was. He knew what it was he wanted to do, what it was he had to do. Somebody, somewhere had to know the bastard who'd done this and when Kai caught up with him he'd make sure that he never did it to anybody else ever again. 

He sat on the sofa holding Kimie in his arms, stroking the boy's hair, murder on his mind. 

Part 13 


	13. Chapter 13

**Killing Time, Part 13**

It wasn't home - not that he considered himself as actually having a home these days - and wasn't even that comfortable but where was the problem with that? It was quieter than a house would be, it exacted fewer demands, it asked for nothing from him but his physical presence and that wasn't difficult. Most of the time. Most of the time they just let him be. 

Occasionally they would try to get him to talk, say something, anything. Smile, damn it. Do something. Please. He knew better than to reply or to react or even act like he was aware of their presence. If he just sat and watched then they left soon enough. 

He knew and knew he liked them all but they were connections to things he didn't want to think about so he ignored them, pushed them away. If he pushed them away then he could push away the memories they always provoked in him. It hurt, the things they said always left him feeling shaken and confused though he didn't show it. He knew that these people were just as hurt by his absence, but he knew enough to know that he didn't want to deal with the things they thought he should be dealing with. They confused and frightened him and he didn't want to be afraid any more, so it was far better to drift. 

He didn't want to talk about it. 

*** 

Kyoichiro stood on a patch of waste ground with his hands in the pockets of his coat and sighed deeply, barely even aware of the drizzle. He didn't need this first thing on a Monday morning when his mouth still tasted of toothpaste and his head was still clogged with sleep. Jesus, but he wished he was back home with his wife and daughter. This case had never looked as if it was going to be an easy one to deal with but it was turning into a total bloody nightmare, not that it had ever been anything but. Who the hell was this guy? What kind of sadistic lunatic was prowling round out there? He couldn't believe it. And why the hell couldn't they find him? 

It had been a woman, probably an attractive woman a few days ago. This was the fifth one now - the official total. If you added the assaults on the students - which Kyoichiro was inclined to; the more he thought about it the more likely it seemed that they had both been botched attempts at murder rather than unusually brutal rapes - it was seven. Five was bad enough, seven was worse, and each one a person. It was easy to think of them as faceless names, but he didn't want to. When he tried to force himself to see all seven as individuals it angered him. The dead girl had wanted more from life than this; so had all the others. 

"You think it's him again?" 

Kyoichiro started at the sound of his partner's voice. She stood a few feet away holding an umbrella, looking down at the woman's broken body. He wondered what she was feeling - this woman was about her age. She wasn't the kind of person to get freaked, though. She couldn't afford to be, what with the job she was in and the case she was working on. She was young, pretty, slender and fashionably dressed; she hardly looked the part but she was a capable woman, was Marie Sakuma. 

"Sure looks that way." "He's getting careless. He hasn't attempted to hide it this time." Kyoichiro smiled slightly. "Why would he? We haven't a clue who he is and he probably knows it." "Guess not." Marie shrugged then gestured to a photographer. 

There was no pattern. Three boys in their late teens - two of whom, the survivors, had been defined as 'bi-curious', the third in a long-term relationship. A teenage girl, the third boy's girlfriend. An office worker in his late twenties. A doctor in his forties - the father of the first victim. And now this young woman. Where was the connection? 

The body lay in a vacant lot in the suburbs, hidden inadequately by weeds. It had not been there long by the looks of it, a day at the most, and in cold weather. Though her clothing was soaking wet as well as ripped and stained and her shirt had been torn open, presumably to allow her attackers to cut her more easily, and her hair was matted, she was dressed save for one high-heeled shoe, brilliant blood-red in colour, which lay a few feet away. Yet again this was just killing for killing's sake - no sex angle - but with the assaults at least a part of it had been lust. On the subject of the assaults, the way this girl had been injured, presumably prior to her death, reminded Kyoichiro of the injuries inflicted on that Mori boy… only in this case they hadn't left her face. That was, unfortunately, becoming normal for this guy as well; they'd had to identify the first two bodies by dental records and the others hadn't been much easier. The girl looked a mess. 

Kyoichiro knew he wasn't Marie - he couldn't pass these things off as easily as Marie did. Or maybe Marie didn't take it lightly either, it just looked as though she did. 

The fact that whoever it was had killed the father of one of the boys who'd lived could have meant something; it would have helped if they could have questioned the boy again, but he was in no state for that. Marie had suggested it, they had got in contact with the family, but nothing had come of it. Apparently the boy had suffered a mental breakdown after his father's death and was back in hospital. Even if he recovered enough to make any kind of statement it probably wouldn't even be sufficient to get a search warrant ordered, let alone stand up in court. 

You should never think things can't get any worse. They invariably do. 

*** 

Occupational therapy; so called because it stops you from thinking. Once upon a time he'd have had something to say about that but not any more. No words. There just weren't any words to express anything any more, and no need to laugh or smile about anything either. They just felt wrong on his face these days, smiles did. Why pretend to be happy? Why pretend to be anything? 

These days he felt very little. He just was. Not happy, not sad, not hysterical. He just was and that was all. Sat at the table he watched his hands - detached, disconnected, dislocated. Things happened and it didn't matter and if it was frustrating so what? What could they do to him that hadn't already been done and worse? What was there to threaten him with that he hadn't already experienced? 

He'd be quite content to stay this way forever. 

So he sat and watched his hands do whatever it was they thought it would help him to do and kept his head down and he hid beneath his fringe. He didn't look up until it was time to leave. This was just a room like all the other rooms he'd been in and if he kept his head down and his eyes averted he was left alone. Invisible. He was no danger. He was no trouble. He just was. 

*** 

Koji's first analysis of Kimie Mori - that he looked better in school uniform than out of it - was not an entirely fair one. His uniform didn't really suit him, for a start, and he looked uncomfortable in it. Then again, he looked uncomfortable with the whole environment. School didn't suit him. He would probably have been a hell of a lot happier if he'd left aged fifteen and got a job - probably as whatever the adolescent male version of an office lady was. 

Or at least that was what Kai thought. 

"Kai my class already thinks I'm a total weirdo do you have any idea what you're doing to my reputation?" It didn't take a genius to work out what the others would make of this, if you asked Kimie. Older men, especially older men who looked like Kai Kurosaki, were not the kind of people he needed to be associated with right now. What the guy was doing in showing up outside his high school at the end of the day… probably only made sense to Kai himself. Kai looked back over his shoulder, gazing at Kimie through slightly narrowed eyes. "I thought you said you didn't have a reputation," he stated blandly before walking off again, Kimie trailing a few paces behind him, horribly aware that he was getting some very strange looks indeed. "I do, it's just a very bad one. And this…" he gestured helplessly round, taking in the school, the gawking fifteen year old girls, everything. "…isn't helping, you know…" "I take it a kiss is out of the question then." Smiling slightly. "We're not dating!" "Yet." "Kai!" Kimie caught up with the older man, flustered, clearly embarrassed; he was blushing. That didn't take much, though. Kai had spent long enough round Kimie to work that one out. To be fair on the boy, though, he was seventeen and still pretty clueless. 

Now that took some doing. Kai had no idea how a boy in Kimie's situation could remain clueless about so many things, but somehow he managed it. Naïveté and then some. It was actually kind of sad, when you thought about it. 

"'Kai' what?" he asked. "What the hell are you talking about? My name means nothing by itself." Kimie attempted to find some way to articulate what he was thinking, giving up after two abortive attempts to get a coherent sentence out of his thoughts which always worked fine in his head but somehow almost never came out quite right when he actually tried to explain them. "Um… nothing. What've you bought a set of kitchen knives for?" Kai started and looked almost guiltily down at the carrier bag he was holding. "I need them," he replied, well aware that this sounded pretty lame. He saw Kimie blink a couple of times. "Fine. I was just wondering… are you planning some kind of blood on the walls kind of revenge trip thing, or are you just taking cooking classes?" Kimie had made himself laugh, probably at the thought of Kai in an apron. "I'm planning to commit bloody murder." Kai replied, totally deadpan. Surprisingly, Kimie laughed again at this. "I didn't think it could be cookery. Now, suppose you tell me why you showed up at my damn school?" 

*** 

She was his sister and they'd said that if he would open up to anyone it would probably be her. She was the only surviving member of his immediate family, after all. She'd once meant a lot to him. 

But he was dead. The part of him that had been her brother was dead. He knew that. There was a what to him, but no why. He survived. He just was. But he wasn't anyone this girl had ever known. When she came and sat with him he looked through her, even though she was different from the others. She never tried to get him to say anything. She seemed to understand. 

But he knew she couldn't understand. When she came and sat with him he acted like she wasn't there. Just like all the others. Tuning out. It wasn't her. It wasn't even them. But they carried memories with them and he didn't want to feel those things anymore, so he pushed them away and pretended he was still alone. 

And when they left the bewilderment and sadness and fear left too. 

*** 

Takafumi turned the radio off with an audible click then turned to face Keisuke, who was looking at him in mild confusion. "I don't want to know." he said by means of an explanation. "I just don't want to know." 

Gazing out of the window at the night, he sighed, oblivious to Keisuke's anxious expression, shivering slightly - was the heating on at the moment? - before drawing the blinds. He didn't want to know and the world was therefore obtrusive. Again again again. A woman's body was discovered… Koji again. Why couldn't someone stop him? Why couldn't the police find the guy? He'd left it too late to report what Koji had done to him, there'd be no evidence. Katsumi could have verified it but Katsumi, not to put too fine a point on it, was crazy. He'd left it too late and the guy was still out there and he hadn't changed a bit. 

Takafumi hadn't realised it at first but the night Koji had murdered Katsumi's father it should have been him who'd died. And it probably would have been had the boy not actively intervened. He didn't like to dwell on the occasion, but he wondered… if Katsumi had been told that this was the deal, would he still have bothered intervening on Takafumi's behalf? It sounded like one of those personality test things - if your father and your best friend were in mortal danger and you could only save one, who would you choose? - and a reassuringly abstract concept at that. It bothered Takafumi. He didn't know what Katsumi would have done if he'd been told what would happen next. Either way, Katsumi's current situation probably wouldn't have changed much - he'd been in a delicate mental state for months. 

If your father and your best friend were in mortal danger and you could only save one, who would you choose? 

"What's on your mind?" Keisuke asked. "What's the matter?" "Nothing's the matter." Takafumi replied, still staring fixedly at the closed curtains. "I'm fine." "I'm not stupid, Takafumi." There was no mistaking the rebuke in his voice. Just because Keisuke didn't have much of a temper didn't mean he didn't have one at all. "What's wrong?" "Gods." Takafumi said, more to himself than Keisuke. "I nearly died." "When?" Coming as it did apropos of nothing, Keisuke found the comment obscure "He would have killed me." Takafumi was still following his own confused train of thought - when he looked back over one shoulder to face Keisuke, his eyes were vague. Keisuke couldn't help but be reminded of Katsumi. "What would you have done if I'd ended like Shibuya?" "Shibuya? Which Shibuya are you talking…" "Like Katsumi's father with a twist." 

Keisuke understood what Takafumi was asking well enough, though he didn't want to have to do so. He knew what it was his lover wasn't saying but didn't want to. Can you imagine what you'd have done if they'd found me lying dead and disfigured on a patch of waste ground, like they did with Katsumi's father? It should have been me there. It would have been. Keisuke, would you have cried if it had been? 

Keisuke had thought of evading the question but in the end decided not to. The answer was simple enough. "I don't know what I'd have done and I don't ever want to find out." "But what would you have done?" Takafumi asked. The question had nagged at him for weeks. "You shouldn't talk like this. You shouldn't think like this." "Idiot." Takafumi said gently. "If you don't like what I'm saying then distract me." 

If your father and your best friend were in mortal danger and you could only save one, who would you choose? 

*** 

Outside it was drizzly and he watched. The silence in the room was heavy, the stillness heavy. He sat on his bed in the unlit room with his arms wrapped round his knees and looked out of the window at the streetlights and the fog and the evening and didn't notice any of it. Still. Like a monochrome print. He was there and at the same time he was not there and there was a distance in his placid brown eyes. 

He knew now that he'd be alone for the rest of the day. Nobody bothered him at this time, at least nobody who would stay for more than a few moments. No more. Just the heavy silence and that was all he wanted, the silence and the feeling that he was alone. 

They missed him, he knew they missed him, but when all they did was make him hurt and all they brought with them was fear and sadness he knew he didn't want to go back. All this he felt but he just was and he truly felt very little these days. Then they all left, they always left in the end when he just watched and acted like he wasn't aware of their presence, and when they left he was left dislocated, lost, alone, isolated, voided… 

Calm. 

*** 

Sometimes Takasaka hated his job. Most of the time, really. It was stressful, the hours were long and he was the kind of person who was inclined by his very nature to think a bit too much. When his cases actually seemed to be worthwhile, when he could actually see some kind of point to it, then he liked it. But when nothing happened and he got the feeling he was just wasting his time, then he wondered why he bothered. 

He looked at the newspaper he'd bought, as ever, on his way into work, and as ever hadn't actually found time to look at, and frowned slightly. Another body discovered on waste ground - the cover photo was of a smiling young woman with long, blonde hair and slightly too much makeup. She reminded him slightly of that first girl who'd died, Eri somebody. Victim number five, they said. The coverage was emotive, hysterical, making much play of the fact that the girl had only recently got engaged. Takasaka pushed it to one side unread. He didn't need to know all that. He'd never liked human interest stories much. After all, it wasn't as if he didn't get enough human interest at work. He didn't read the tabloids - so why the so-called quality dailies couldn't report on this a bit more objectively… then again, human interest stories, especially about these kinds of subjects, sold papers. 

His problem was he thought too much and lacked something that he desperately needed. He couldn't seem to see things at one remove and treat it like just another job. All the things that bothered him just came with the territory. He wasn't temperamentally suited to the job he did. 

It was obvious what, or rather who, had brought this on. Shibuya bothered him. Had done for a long time. The first time he'd met the boy he'd obviously needed to talk about the things that had landed him in hospital the first time - in the one session they'd had, Katsumi had said something along the lines of 'could you call this a betrayal'. Takasaka still didn't really understand what it was he'd meant by that: the implication, though, had been that the person who'd tried to kill him had been someone he'd once trusted. From the evidence he'd gone on to blame himself and still was blaming himself. 

What was the point, though, of trying to counsel someone who never spoke? They'd had a couple of sessions and all that happened was that they sat there. Katsumi didn't even look at him, he kept his eyes fixed on the floor, his hands, or occasionally at a blank spot on the wall or the unremarkable view from the window. Sure, Takasaka had made several attempts to get the boy to talk or failing that to react, but nothing had come of it. 

The boy was in deep depression and serious denial. It was almost as if he thought that by ignoring his problems they'd go away by themselves. Takasaka could have told him (and had, not that he'd got any discernable reaction out of the boy) that it wouldn't work. On top of everything else his job was maddeningly frustrating at times. 

*** 

Of course he found it hard to sleep. Even in the lonely, heavy silence it was hard. He couldn't escape it fully. It was still there no matter how hard he wanted to forget it because it was his past and it was in him and it was him. He hid it during the day but he couldn't hide, not really. 

Not when it was in him and it was him. 

He hadn't wanted to break the silence, he'd been comfortable with it. He'd wanted to stay this way forever. It didn't demand anything of him. It didn't hurt. It just was. It left him dazed and strangely calm and somehow almost content, even though he was empty and had known that he was empty. He could live with it. It wasn't uncertainty and misery and terrible, crippling dread. He couldn't live with that but it seemed that he had to. He hadn't been given the choice. 

He had no words but didn't need them. He couldn't hide, not really. So why was he pretending? Afterwards he felt a little better for it - it had been a small release. He'd kept it all in and it hadn't helped either. Maybe they were right and it was therapeutic after all. 

Outside the rain fell, steadily and relentlessly. 

Part 14 


	14. Chapter 14

**Killing Time, Part 14**

Izumi watched Koji as the man sat slumped in the sofa in the living room, staring fixedly at the rug they'd bought to cover the discoloured spot on the carpet. He was brooding again, it didn't take a genius to work that one out. Izumi would have laid money that he knew what it was that was on his mind. This was getting annoying, very annoying. If he was still obsessing over that bottle-blonde whose name Izumi had almost totally forgotten, or the high school boy who'd seemed even more clueless than the majority of high school boys did, or that drunken girl and her boyfriend or any of the others, he wanted to know why. 

Izumi himself certainly didn't think like that about any of them. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Again it had been Serika's fault. Izumi had gone to meet her from school and Koji had tagged along after him. When his sister arrived she was talking to another girl, slightly smaller than she was, her light brown hair in a bob. They'd been talking. The conversation hadn't been long and certainly hadn't been very meaningful, but it had been enough. "Oh, how's your brother?" "Not much better. He just wants to be alone all the time, so… me seeing him doesn't help much." "Serious? He wants to be by himself all of the time?" "Mm. Apparently it's common, with depression." "But that'd drive me… niisan! Hello! You remember Madoka, don't you? She's coming home with me today." Izumi had looked at Koji and he could tell that the name had registered with him straight away. He'd looked surprised. He'd been largely quiet until Serika and her friend had left. Izumi, by contrast, hadn't thought there was anything at all unusual about the girl. He'd seen her with Serika a couple of times before. She was just another fairly unremarkable high-school girl. 

"Koji." Izumi said. "Snap out of it." Koji looked up from the rug. He seemed tired, anxious. "Do you know who she was?" Izumi blinked. "Know who who was?" "She's Katsumi's sister." Koji replied, little caring about Izumi's decidedly noncommittal answer. There was still no sign of recognition on Izumi's face. "Who's Katsumi and what's he got to do with anything?" Koji looked at him in incredulity. "You can't even remember who he is?" It was surprising Izumi hadn't actually noticed the danger signs. It was probably because he wasn't expecting them, certainly wasn't looking for them. "No, I've barely even heard of him before. Who is he and why should I know him?" "Because you told me to kill him is why!" On a purely intellectual level Koji was surprised by the anger in his voice. Izumi looked at Koji in mild disdain. "Oh. The blonde, right? Koji, this was back in July, why drag it up now?" "I saw the way you looked at his sister. Izumi, we are not hurting that girl!" "And why on earth not?" Izumi asked. "Because…" 

Koji supposed he'd better come clean with Izumi, but how could he put it so he didn't sound totally crazy? How could he say it? He'd seen Katsumi again, but the boy hadn't recognised him. Out of some kind of morbid fascination Koji had found out when his father's funeral was, had gone along to look - probably he'd just wanted to see him, maybe he'd been hoping to talk to him again. He didn't know why. As it was Koji hadn't managed to do anything of the sort. He'd seen Katsumi sat with some male relative a few yards from the rest of the mourners. He'd been crying openly and hadn't seemed to realise that his companion was trying to talk to him, either that or he just didn't care. He probably wanted his father. Then after the funeral he'd gone back home with his stepmother and sister and he'd tried to kill himself again. 

Koji didn't know why he hadn't thought. In under twenty-four hours he'd raped one of Katsumi's best friends then killed his father and then he'd wondered why the boy was so sad. 

"Haven't we done enough to him?" Koji asked incredulously. "He fell in love with me, that's not his fault! We've raped him, orphaned him and driven him mad, isn't that enough to be getting on with? You want to kill his little sister too? Izumi, if you so much as touch her…" "Oh, you're threatening me now? Very impressive, Koji. I'm not one of those slutty girls you've been dragging home and I'm not some pretty, empty-headed teenager. Save your threats for someone they may actually scare." "I'm not threatening you, I'm…" Koji hesitated. "I just want to leave that boy alone! He didn't do anything to you, why can't you leave him be? Please, Izumi. Not her too. She's just a child!" Izumi snorted. "If you're so devoted to that space cadet Katsumi, why don't you go find him and tell him all this? Get out, Koji. Don't even think about coming back until you've calmed down." "Izumi…" The look on Izumi's face was strange, frightening, and Koji gazed at him in consternation as he gestured toward the door, barely restrained anger obvious in his voice. "I said get out, Koji. Go. Now. Lock the door behind you." 

*** 

It wasn't the place he normally went to. It was the place he normally went to when he needed to be alone. He'd never brought Izumi in here. The place wasn't worryingly smart or exclusive, but it had a nice location, reasonable décor and fairly nice-looking staff. It wasn't as gloomy in here, the chairs weren't as uncomfortable, and it was seldom, if ever packed to capacity, though it nonetheless seemed to do good business. 

Koji had been there for an hour or so and he was feeling miserably drunk. At this time of day the bar was practically deserted apart from one or two hard-core alcoholics, a businessman with a girl young enough to be his daughter but who almost definitely wasn't his daughter, and the barman, a bottle-blonde in his early twenties, who looked like a starlet with the morals of an alley cat, and as if he would go to bed with anyone who seemed even remotely interested. If the guy was even half as bored with serving drinks as he appeared he should definitely have handed in his notice on the spot. The most animated Koji had seen him all afternoon was during the five-minute phone call he'd received from some girl called Kimie. God knew who Kimie was and what she had to do with this man here. If she was his girlfriend, Koji almost felt sorry for her. 

If Koji hadn't been so heartily sick of the entire enterprise he might have tried to get the man to come home with him, but he didn't want to. He didn't know this man and certainly had no reason to dislike him, so why he would want to take him home… 

Koji gestured the barman over and ordered another drink - the young man arched one slender eyebrow in mild surprise as he surveyed the glasses already lined up in front of him. "Just how drunk are you intending on getting?" "A lot." Koji replied shortly. "I can still remember everything." "Dare I ask what it is you're trying to forget? Girlfriend troubles?" "You could say that." Koji replied. He watched the young man pick up the glasses in front of him and stack them neatly out of sight before turning to the line of bottles behind him. "Same again, wasn't it?" Koji nodded. "Yeah." It was all the same to Koji want it was he drank. He didn't really care what noxious creation this blonde wanted to lay on him just as long as it stopped him thinking straight. 

The guy was completely, comprehensively drunk. Kai didn't really like it when people got this drunk on him. He'd seen this guy a couple of times before and it wasn't like he couldn't hold his drink so why was he getting so hammered today? He didn't know. Maybe the guy was a bigger alcoholic than he had suspected. Maybe he'd just had a bad night. Oh well. As long as the guy kept paying he'd keep serving him. All the same… 

"Hey, steady on." Kai watched in quiet consternation as the man drained his glass bare seconds after he had put it down in front of him. "We don't give out prizes if you finish in under fifteen seconds, you know." "No? Well, you should." The man started laughing. Kai rolled his eyes. Someone was pissed. "I think you've had enough." Kai narrowed his eyes and spoke coldly, then added, almost as an afterthought, "Sir." The man glowered at him. "I'll be the judge of that." "Oh, of course." The man was clearly a lost cause. Kai wasn't quite sure why he was bothering to talk to the guy, except for the fact that there was quite obviously nobody else to talk to and nothing else to do. 

A small, soft beep indicated that the dishwasher had finished its cycle and he turned away to retrieve the clean glasses from the machine, stooping slightly in order to pick up the dishwasher tray and place it near one of the sinks behind the bar, the occasional clinking of the glasses as he wiped, sorted and stacked them sounding strangely loud in the near-silent room, the only other noises the low voices of the salaryman talking at his secretary, mistress, girlfriend or whoever it was he had with him - Kai's money was on mistress - the piped pop music that had been popular for six weeks over half a year ago and which Kai hadn't liked even then. He preferred his music to express far less saccharine-sweet feelings, but it wasn't right for the afternoon so he just had to cope. He normally didn't mind his job but slow days like this sucked, big time. 

Koji stared moodily into his glass and waited for the barman to finish doing whatever it was he was doing with the glasses before attempting to talk to him again. You never know - getting a bit of impartial advice might be just what he needed right now. "You ever made a… really bad choice? About life or something?" The blonde grinned suddenly. "I've had a couple of girlfriends I'd have been happier not knowing." "Oh. See… I was worried it was just me." 

Here we go, Kai thought to himself. Someone's in a 'wouldn't it be a great idea to share my most intimate secrets with a barman?' mood. Wonderful. Still, he supposed it would help kill some time and listening to drunken confessions came with the territory. 

"You see, there was this…" Koji hesitated. He wasn't quite sure what gender he should say the protagonists in his life story were. Eventually he settled for the less worrying female. He had no idea how the barman would have reacted to the truth even though it didn't look like it'd have mattered that much to him (Koji had him down as the 'I'll jump anything with a pulse' type), but better safe than sorry. "… this girl I liked? Problem is, well, I already had a girlfriend, and she wasn't happy about it, so she… well, she got me to do something drastic to this other girl. Just to scare her, but… we… well, we kind of got carried away." Koji could tell the man wasn't really listening to him judging from his politely bored expression and slightly glazed eyes, but he carried on anyway. 

*** 

"I don't get it. Why me?" 

The only illumination in the room came from the windows. They had not closed the blinds, but it didn't matter. It was dark outside, the light in the room the reflected glow of the streetlamps, occasionally the glare from the headlights of a passing car. In the gloom Keisuke could only just make out Takafumi's face and couldn't see his expression clearly, it was far too dark for that. Even before his lover spoke, though, Keisuke knew something was the matter. 

"What do you mean, why you?" 

Another one of those nights. No accident they happen after dark. It was strange, and sad in a way. Though he tried to hide it Takafumi had been very clearly distressed by what had happened to him the day Katsumi's father had been murdered; Keisuke couldn't help but feel ill at ease, as if it was somehow an imposition just to put his arms round his lover unless Takafumi made it very plain that he wanted him to. And if anything he wanted to far more often than he had before. They had just made love, but had not spoken since until Takafumi, lying flat on his back with his eyes open as if he were dead, had unexpectedly broken the silence. 

"I'm just confused… why is this my life?" He turned to Keisuke, clearly bewildered. "You're a nice guy from a… what do they call it again? A good family. You should be engaged by now, or have a steady girlfriend, or be seeing some girl at least. There's plenty of nice women out there and it's not like they don't like you judging from how many of them hit on you in front of me, so why me?" "Because." Keisuke replied simply. "They're not you." "Sappy." Takafumi said with a small smile. "But seriously, Kei. You don't think we've made a mistake? We've been seeing each other since high school and I still think you'd probably like being with a girl a lot more than you do me. You know…" he broke off and sighed. "You know I was convinced when we first started seeing each other that it'd last two months at the most then you'd realise all this was ridiculous and that all we'd managed to do was blow our friendship? You're so… conventional in a lot of ways. You just don't seem the 'boyfriend' type. Damn, you're probably fantastic husband material, that might be why all those girls flirt with you…" Keisuke blinked in the darkness. "Well, I thought you'd get bored with me long before now. You've had far less conventional boyfriends than me. I know you had a lot of lovers when we were in school, why aren't you with one of them?" Takafumi had started tracing a pattern on the bedsheets with the tip of his right index finger; he concentrated on it rather than looking at Keisuke. "Because they didn't love me. It was just sex. I went with any man who asked and none of them liked me let alone loved me. I got around more than my sister did and everyone said she was a tramp, but at least she actually liked the people she slept with. I'd be prepared to lay money that the first time you heard my name it was because someone was warning you not to get too friendly with me because everyone said I was easy." "Why did you do that?" Keisuke guessed this was revisionist history. He'd always been under the impression that Takafumi had been crazy about some of his other partners even if on occasion it had been 'just sex'. He'd certainly loved his previous boyfriend and after they'd broken up he had cried on Keisuke's shoulder, who had then been his best friend. Definitely revisionist history. "Because I'm a slut. If you don't want a girl you could get a far less trashy boyfriend." 

There. Keisuke had known it was coming. Takafumi had been upset by what had happened to him, maybe not as obviously or as seriously as Katsumi had, but still he'd been upset and it showed. It had become painfully obvious to Keisuke that his lover had blamed himself for 'letting' that man Nanjo rape him, just the same as Katsumi blamed himself for everything Nanjo had ever done to anybody. "You are not trashy." He spoke firmly. "Liar." Takafumi sounded regretful, as if he didn't want to say it but felt he had to. "Don't do that, Keisuke, there's no need to spare my feelings. It doesn't help things any. Why don't you just say what you think instead of worrying about me?" "Because it is what I think and you're being stupid. Why are you blaming yourself for something that couldn't possibly be your fault? You're not a slut, nobody ever thought you were, except perhaps yourself. Snap out of it. Please." Takafumi hesitated. "If I'm not a slut then why…" "You think he cared either way what you were or you weren't? You were just there. You don't think it was Katsumi's fault that Koji-- you don't think he asked for it do you? What makes you any different?" "You don't understand." Takafumi said simply. "I'm not surprised you can't and I wouldn't want you to. It's not your fault, but you don't understand." 

*** 

Kai had left before Koji did, meeting up with Kimie outside the bar. The boy had come straight from school, or at least he hadn't changed out of his uniform and was still carrying his book bag, which was pretty much the same thing. He was leaning casually against a lamppost, following the advice they give young teenagers about staying to lighted areas to the letter, not that staying in crowds and light had helped him last time. He was holding his bag behind his back, his posture was that of someone who had been waiting a long time and could have carried on doing so for hours. One thing he didn't look was bored. Kai wondered what he had been thinking about. 

He couldn't believe that anyone would have been able to see a boy like this as nothing more than a victim, someone to use and abuse any which way and then discard. There was more to him than that. He was so much more than a crime statistic or a traumatised victim. 

"I had an argument with my mum." he said as Kai approached. "This morning." "What about?" Kai asked incuriously. Kimie shrugged. "Just stuff. You know how it is with arguments. It started over whether or not it was a disadvantage to be bad at baseball. She thinks you're a bad influence." He fell silent, picking at a loose thread on his bag, then looked up again. "How was work?" "Boring," Kai said. "We've had about seven customers in all afternoon and the only one who stayed more than an hour was trying to drink himself into a stupor because he's made a couple of mistakes with women." "Bo-ring," Kimie agreed with a giggle. "But at least you're not working in an office." "Is that such a bad thing?" Kai had never liked the idea of office work but much more of the afternoon shift and they'd probably drive him to it. "They'd make you cut your hair. Well… not make you… but you know what I mean." 

Kai looked at his watch. Nearly six. It felt a lot later, for some reason, probably the darkness. It got dark quickly at this time of year. It wasn't a warm night. He wondered how long Kimie had been waiting, but decided not to ask. He'd tell him if he wanted to and it was a stupid question anyway. It was a shame the kid still lived with his parents, though, not to mention kinda restrictive. Whilst he was on the subject… "What time do your folks expect you back?" he asked. "They don't." Kimie said with a shrug. "I told them I was staying round a friend's. I had to give them your number so they'd let me go. I think they're actually kinda relieved, you know… that I'm going out more and stuff, I mean." 

He wondered why the boy hadn't bothered getting changed before they met up. It would make it hard to take him anywhere, not that it wasn't hard normally. He didn't look much older in casual clothes, partly due to the way he acted. He looked gauche - hell, he was gauche. Kai wasn't quite sure if the way Kimie stood would be described as effeminate or childish. What was it about Kimie? He was no more than quietly attractive; he certainly wasn't beautiful in any conventional way. He was the kind of person Kai normally looked at once then ignored. He was a nice enough kid, even if he was a bit weird with it, but Kai wasn't normally the kind of person who set much store by character. 

Kai had no idea what he saw in him. 

*** 

"Why doesn't she take her shoes off? She's a dork for trying to run in those things." "Of course she's a dork. If she was smarter she'd never have gone outdoors." "But it's the dumbest thing she could have done. Why the hell'd she decide to walk home from her boyfriend's at three in the morning when she could have got a cab?" "Because she's a filler character. She's only in the story at all to bump up the body count, you expect her to act smart as well?" "Well… no. But I did expect her not to be, well, totally stupid…" "Filler characters aren't allowed brains. Only the main characters are allowed to try and save their lives." "That's dumb." "Of course it's dumb." "This programme sucks." "Of course it sucks." "Then why are we watching it? I hate detective shows." 

Of course he would. Whatever way you looked at it, shows about maverick detective so-and-so and his gorgeous but totally professional female partner, whose life he would undoubtedly end up saving before the end of the programme so that they could end up an item, trying to catch this and that psychotic lunatic who was going round attacking well-endowed young women, were the kind of shows that Kimie would probably go out of his way to avoid. Whichever way you looked at it, Kai thought, this was a bad choice of programme. 

"I'll turn it off." Kai said. "Doesn't that bother you?" Kimie asked. "Weren't you watching it?" Kai grinned. "See one of these and you've seen 'em all. The girl the hero works with'll get in danger, he saves her, they kiss, the psycho is packed off to prison and they all live happily ever after. Credits." He turned the television off. Kimie was looking at his hands. Kai had noticed this; he did it when things were troubling him, when he was thinking things he didn't want to consider. "…TV's convenient like that." "Yeah." Kai agreed. "The cops always get the bad guys, the bad guys always get theirs, the girl gets saved, the guy gets the girl. Guess that's what people want. Reality's bad enough." He didn't need to convince Kimie about that one. "Tell me about it." he said. He had his arms round his knees again. "But isn't there plenty of serial killer stuff in the news right now? What'd we need these stupid dramas for? Why don't people just buy a bloody paper if they want cheap thrills?" 

Because in real life the killer doesn't always get found. There's no kiss after the danger's passed, no happy ending. Sometimes there's no ending at all. Life's anything but convenient. 

"The shows know when to stop." Kai said. "And life doesn't?" Kimie asked. He shook his head, laughed softly and derisively. "No. Guess not." "What kind of ending do you want?" Kai asked suddenly, filling up the silence that followed. "To what? All this… stuff that's been happening?" Kimie asked, pausing when Kai nodded. "…a definite one." He said finally. "Like I know there'll be no more." Kai squeezed one of Kimie's hands. "Don't worry. It'll happen." he said quietly. 

Startled, Kimie turned, looking directly at Kai for the first time since they'd started talking, his expression one of quiet apprehension. "You'll make it happen, you mean. You're going to make me a TV ending." When Kai didn't say anything, he carried on. "I thought it was a joke… but you were serious about those knives then. You want to…" "Yes." Kai interrupted. "Of course I want to." "But if it's revenge… that's something I've got to do myself. You can't do it for me and I wouldn't want you--" Kimie broke off and fell silent for what felt to Kai like an age. He wondered what he was thinking about. The look in his eyes was strange, one Kai had never seen from him before. "Okay. Do it." he said. Level, calm. The calmness in his voice came as a surprise to both of them. "If you want to do that for me, go ahead. But only…" "Only what?" Kai asked quietly. The boy looked away, his reply was practically a whisper. "... but… only if I can do it too." 


End file.
